Terminus
by xbritomartx
Summary: Things go according to Alexandria's plan during Cell. A discredited Taylor is sent to the Birdcage for killing Tagg, but Cauldron intercepts her and puts her to work.
1. Exfiltrate 1

**Exfiltrate 1.1**

I woke up and immediately wished I hadn't.

I was still in the vehicle that was transporting me from prison in Boston to the Birdcage, still up to my chin in containment foam. Still alone, still trapped in a narrow, confined space, and still utterly unable to move.

Truth be told? I was a little surprised that they hadn't provided a recording of Emma or Bonesaw taunting me, since they'd managed to make this journey my personal hell in every other respect.

I also had to pee.

I couldn't even use my power to distract myself. The vehicle I was trapped in was moving too quickly for me to get a handle on any bugs in the areas we passed through. Worse, there was a tinker device somewhere in the truck and it was suppressing my power in much the same way Leet's swarm machine had jammed it during the fight against Coil.

And, finally, the psychiatrist in the prison infirmary had prescribed a drug intended to reduce my allegedly aggressive outbursts, and it made me slower, more quiescent than I had every right to be under the circumstances.

An antipsychotic.

For not being calm enough about one of the world's greatest "heroes" brutally taking my team apart so her organization wouldn't have to change a little.

For being less than content about being railroaded in a slapdash farce of a trial.

For reacting to being broken, humiliated, and stripped of everything in front of my father.

 _Fucking_ laughable.

Maybe I _was_ crazy. Crazy to have thought I could be a hero to begin with, crazy to think the Protectorate was trustworthy, crazy to think I could have started to reform it.

Maybe this world was so fundamentally fucked up that treating someone who wanted things to work the way they should just this fucking once for psychosis _was_ the right thing to do.

The truck slowed and turned, then slowed again. Less than fifteen seconds later, it came to a stop.

Despite the haloperidol, my adrenaline spiked. We were already there? Had I really been asleep that long?

I heard the locks on the door being undone, and I braced myself. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I'd be ready to act the moment I saw an opportunity.

The door opened. I wasn't sure what I'd expected, but the aggressively normal man who was peering at me through large frame glasses . . . wasn't it.

He was in his late thirties, clean-shaven and short-haired, dressed in a light blue dress shirt and tan slacks. I would have said he was tidy, but the pocket protector in his left breast pocket pushed him into _fussiness_. Something about him seemed . . . off. Nobody who dressed like that would naturally be in the business of prison breaks.

"Are you with Dragon?" I blurted.

He looked surprised.

Apparently not.

I tried again. "Who are you?"

"We've met, after a fashion," he said, hoisting himself into the truck. "I'm the Number Man."

I blinked, still trying to make him mesh with my expectations of what was going to happen to me. "The Birdcage has an accountant?" I asked stupidly.

He looked thoughtful. "Not to my knowledge."

My drug-crippled thought process eventually caught up. " _Cauldron_ ," I spat.

He sprayed something from what looked like a can of mace on the yellow containment foam, and it started to dissolve. "Yes," he said.

 _No_ , I thought. The Birdcage suddenly became a lot more appealing. It was true that Lung and Bakuda were there, but so was Panacea—another reminder of the system's incompetence—and she could _make_ bugs.

"Why are you kidnapping me?" I asked.

"Kidnap?" he asked. "Most would call this a rescue, considering that the alternative is death in the Birdcage."

"I'll survive until the end of the world regardless of where I go," I said, giving voice to one of the thoughts that I'd used to ground myself in the days between Alexandria's destruction of the Undersiders and my trial. Whatever happened, I still had a role to play and I still had to prepare. "I know too much about Cauldron to think that a 'rescue' from you will work out in my favor."

"I recommend withholding judgment until your understanding of our operations comes from us and not Echidna," he said. "We pride ourselves on our ability to reach mutually satisfactory arrangements."

The containment foam finished dissolving, and I found myself having to lean against the side of the van to help support my weight. My legs were asleep.

"Is that so," I said. I flexed my feet to help restore circulation. "Forgive me if I don't take your word for it."

"That's reasonable," he said. Satisfied I was free, he turned and hopped out of the truck. After a few seconds I followed him, doing my best to ignore the pins and needles in my legs, and took in my surroundings. The truck had been parked inside the warehouse. Despite the Tinker device interfering with my control, I could still sense the thousands of tiny lives surrounding us—worms underneath the floor, cockroaches in the corners and under boxes, termites in the walls, spiders and their prey distributed throughout.

Why would they go to so much effort to send me to the Birdcage only to prevent me from arriving? Maybe Alexandria had told the truth about Cauldron distancing itself from her, and the two had different agendas. I admittedly _was_ curious about what they'd have to say. If nothing else, they were powerful and I could try to talk to them about finding Jack Slash.

Still, I was free here and now, and even in hand-to-hand combat I figured I had a shot against an unarmed, middle-aged man whose power, if he had one, was bank accounts. If I could tackle him, I could take the keys and drive the truck somewhere else.

I selected his lower back as my target. He was distracted, saying something about a door, and I charged him. My legs protested, but I built up some speed and flung myself out of the back of the truck.

He sidestepped me completely, and I ended up crashing headfirst into a white refrigerator that hadn't been there when I'd started moving.

"Watch your step," he said blandly.

I picked myself up.

He was smiling slightly, damn him.

I didn't give him the satisfaction of massaging my forehead to check for damage. I knew it would swell and bruise within the hour, and I'd tend to it later, if I got a chance to be alone.

I looked around. Where had the warehouse gone? I reached out with my power to get a better grasp of my surroundings, but—nothing. Not a single bug in my entire radius.

Humans were _not_ that clean, _ever_ , so that left me with only one possible conclusion: either we were in space, or whoever cleaned the building we were standing in had superpowers.

I didn't comment on my inability to use my power—he probably already knew, anyway—and studied my new surroundings. I was standing in a kitchenette that opened up into a larger room where a white chair set before a white desk with a white laptop. Behind it, white pillows with white pillowcases sat atop a white bed with white sheets and a white comforter. A white door opened off the kitchen area to a bathroom which contained only white fixtures and was stocked with white towels and hygiene products in white bottles.

The layout and furnishings put me in mind of a hotel room designed for long-term stays, but the color scheme screamed something more like _prison_ or _psych ward_. The spartan interior décor and lack of windows combined to give me a general sense of unease. Did they _mean_ to be so sinister?

"Is there something about being evil that forbids you from using color?" I asked.

His smile became a warmer, bigger one. "That's a question I encourage you to ask at the meeting tomorrow. I'd be interested to hear the answer myself."

"Meeting?"

"Yes, our founder wants to talk with you about how you'd like to occupy yourself the for the next two years. I'll collect you a little before eight. Door." A portal opened. He stepped into a similarly featureless hallway and was gone before I could give voice to any of the half-dozen questions that sprang to mind, not the least of which was what time it was now.


	2. Exfiltrate 2

**Exfiltrate 1.2**

I beelined for the computer.

When I booted it up, it didn't prompt me for a password. Instead the loading screen displayed an oddly positioned omega—no, a C, turned upward at a forty-five degree angle. The same symbol I'd seen tattooed on Newter and Gregor the Snail.

The Number Man had said Cauldron had a knack for figuring out "mutually beneficial" arrangements. I thought Gregor, Newter, Gully, and Weld would disagree—and that it would _not_ be in my interest to forget that.

The first thing I did when the computer loaded was check the time. Just after midnight. I'd seen daylight through the windows of the warehouse, which meant that I was now in a time zone well ahead of any in North America.

Then I remembered how Alexandria had reacted to our portal in Brockton Bay and compared it with the ease with which Number Man called portals into existence. Maybe I was in _a_ North America, if not the one I recognized as home . . . something to ask about, maybe.

I searched the computer. There were no files that I could see stored on the hard drive and I didn't have access to any of the other computers in the local network. Worse, but not surprisingly, I couldn't find a program to access the web. I knew, rationally, that it had been too much to hope for internet, but there was still a level on which I was disappointed.

Defeated, I put the computer on standby and went to the bathroom.

When I was done, I decided to investigate the refrigerator—this time using my hands instead of my forehead. It held milk and ingredients for a variety of sandwiches. I made a peanut butter and jelly and explored the rest of the room. The closet had a dresser in it. I opened it and found underwear, bras, socks, black jeans, white t-shirts, and black sneakers.

They weren't clothes I'd have picked out for myself, and the fact they were all my size was more than a little unsettling, but they were much better than the orange jumpsuit I was wearing. I changed into one of the t-shirts and prepared to go to bed. A shower was in order, but I chose to hold off on taking one so I wouldn't have to sleep on wet hair.

Not that I expected to get much sleep. I'd slept for most of the trip from Boston, and I felt too anxious and curious to sleep. I'd still go through the motions.

As I settled into the bed, which was _much_ more comfortable than anything owned by a villainous corporation had any right to be, I realized I'd underestimated my exhaustion. _Maybe_ , I thought, _I should see if I can use the computer to set an alarm_ . . .

I awoke to something brushing against my face.

Suddenly alert, I sat up and flipped on the light immediately. Nobody was there.

Maybe the air conditioning? But there wasn't a vent aimed at my bed. I tried to think of alternative explanations, but nothing was forthcoming. I reluctantly chalked it up to my imagination or an uncomfortably realistic dream and set about showering and getting dressed.

As I made myself another sandwich, this one turkey and cheese, I reflected on what I'd seen of Cauldron so far. The _whiteness_ of everything spooked me a little for reasons I still couldn't articulate, but everything else, from the bed to my jeans to the food, struck me as being of extremely high quality. Each thing here had been _chosen_ , I thought, and paid for with a great deal more money than I'd have ever felt comfortable spending.

Then it clicked for me. All of this—the secret base, the money and resources implicit behind everything, the impression of _systematic_ control—it reminded me of Coil, more than anything else. Had _he_ been a Cauldron cape? He was exactly who I thought of when I thought of the kind of person who would purchase a product refined by human experimentation.

I finished the sandwich and checked the time on the computer. Seven-thirty. I wasn't sure what the Number Man had meant when he said he'd pick me up at a little before eight, but I figured that it left me enough time to explore my surroundings.

I'd entered through a portal the night before, but my room had a more usual door. I tried it, found it was unlocked, and stepped through into a white-tiled hallway. I ventured out of my room and tried the other doors I saw. All were unlocked and led to rooms identical to mine. I checked the refrigerators and closets in the first four or five and found them empty. Was I the only one here?

I couldn't be certain that I'd be able to find my way back through the labyrinthine corridors without my bugs, so I didn't go far.

On my way back to my room, I thought about the capes I knew were Cauldron-made. The Siberian, Grey Boy, the Triumvirate. The last three were the most powerful capes around barring Scion, the Siberian had been considered invulnerable until Tattletale had worked out the creator's secret, and Grey Boy . . . _everyone_ knew about Grey Boy. Nobody talked about him, or thought about him if they could help it.

The Travelers had gotten vials, and they'd been as powerful as they'd been difficult to work with. Then there were the Case 53s, the monsters, the "Subjects" mentioned in the contract Faultline's Crew had seized. People like Weld and Newter, physically warped but more than capable of holding their own in a fight.

None of that touched the _rest_ of the power I knew Cauldron wielded. They'd controlled the PRT through Alexandria, the Eidolon clone had said they could manipulate the American media, and the Number Man had been known as a neutral accountant for _any_ supervillain group. I had the impression that they were playing both sides of the game, like arms dealers selling to every country in a conflict and profiting off the collective misery and death of everyone caught in between.

And the person orchestrating all of this wanted to talk to _me_ , had gone to some lengths to obtain me. Why? The Number Man had mentioned the next two years, and it was easy enough to see where that number had come from: Dinah's prophecy about Jack.

Did they know where he was? But if that were so, why would they need _me_? What could I do that they couldn't? Why did they expect it to take two years? What would happen after that? Did they know what Jack was supposed to do to end the world?

My mind was more active than it had been, which I optimistically took as a sign that the drugs were wearing off, but now it was chasing itself in circles. I needed answers, data, a _mission_.

I looked at the computer again. It was 7:56. I started to wonder if I'd been forgotten.

Two minutes passed before I heard a knock on the door.

"Good morning," the Number Man said when I opened it. "I hope you slept well?"

"Isn't the meeting supposed to be at eight?" I asked. "Aren't we cutting it a little close?"

He waved a hand and the air behind him parted to reveal a set of double doors.

Of course. Portals would practically eliminate transportation time.

He held his arm out, gesturing me to go through the doors. "After you."

I pushed open one of the doors and found a conference room, again all white and again without windows. There were already two people in the room, and on seeing them my body _instantly_ readied itself for a fight.

The man in the cargo pants and green hoodie who sat in the office chair closest to the doors barely registered. I noticed that he nodded when I came in, though I judged the greeting to be directed more at the Number Man than me because he didn't introduce himself.

I knew who he was, anyway, because I recognized him from fighting Noelle. I saw now that Echidna hadn't warped him much; Eidolon _was_ ugly and he _did_ seem to be so much smaller than his powerset and reputation warranted.

But my attention was arrested by the woman in jeans and a blouse sitting at the other end of the table, in the seat furthest from the doors and consequently me. She'd gone without makeup today, which made the star-shaped scar on the edge of her left eye stand out.

 _Alexandria_.


	3. Exfiltrate 3

**Exfiltrate 1.3**

Alexandria had complained about the inadequacy of the English language to convey the seriousness of her intention to stop me from making a favorable deal with the Protectorate and destroy my team.

As I met her eye, less than two weeks after we'd had that conversation, I _understood_ what she meant. I doubted there were words in _any_ language that could accurately express the strength and degree of my hatred. Only my bugs could do that, and I didn't have them.

So I didn't even try to find words. Instead, I reached back to who I was before I'd gotten powers, called on the techniques I'd developed during my freshman year of high school, to swallow my anger and _cope_. To forge ahead, somehow.

"I see you lied about Cauldron severing contact with you," I said. "Color me surprised."

"Astonishing," she said. "When you saw me, you looked more murderous than you did while you were committing murder. Then you shut it down in a fraction of a second and now you're asking questions as though you're only angry instead of in a homicidal rage. That degree of self-control is remarkable."

"I've had practice," I ground out. Two and a half years of being on the wrong end of the powerful, two and a half years of being unable to rely on the system that was supposed to protect me, and then another four months of _dealing_ with the fact the rest of the world's authorities were just as corrupt and lazy as a high school administration. "The Number Man said I was supposed to talk to the founder of Cauldron today. Did he mean _you_?"

"It _must_ be a side-effect of your secondary Thinker power, the one that allows you to spread your focus across hundreds of thousands if not millions of data points," she mused. "Obvious, now that I know to look for it. And no. I was a test subject."

"A test subject?" I repeated. This didn't jibe with my mental picture of Cauldron, with the kidnapped "deviants" like the Irregulars on the one hand, and the people who profited off of their suffering on the other. "Like the Case 53s?"

"Yes and no."

I jumped, startled by the sudden interruption.

Eidolon, whom I'd completely forgotten, had spoken. "I was in a bad situation and Cauldron offered me a way out. It was the same for Legend and Hero."

" _Hero_ was in on this, too? But—the Siberian killed him." Did Cauldron have _any_ control over the monsters they created?

"We know," Alexandria said drily. "We were there."

I still had a hard time reconciling the image of the heroes I'd always had with the ambiguous, corrupt reality, and being reminded that Alexandria _had_ done all the things she was admired for—it almost shut me up.

Almost. "I've fought the Siberian," I said. "I almost killed him, too. I would have succeeded if Bonesaw hadn't interfered. Much the same way Kid Win's drones kept me from putting _you_ down."

 _Tinkers._

Alexandria was unimpressed. "Are you going somewhere with this?" she asked sardonically.

"I just wanted you to know that I've also seen first-hand what Siberian can do in a fight," I said.

She scoffed. "Trying to build rapport? The interrogation is over."

I shook my head. "There _are_ similarities between us," I said. "I don't have perfect recall, but I remember you said something about how you love your teammates."

"I did." She looked at Eidolon. "It was true."

I leaned forward, set both hands on the table. "Then I'm glad you can't forget exactly how Hero died."

It was petty, it was vicious, it was even a little cruel, with Eidolon there—and it was _exactly_ what I wanted. There _were_ words that could convey my pain.

Her eyes widened a fraction—not a lot, but enough to confirm that she was at least a little taken aback. When she didn't immediately shoot off a smooth reply, I knew that I'd gotten through on some level, and _that_ would do until I could get my bugs back.

Another portal opened, this one at the other end of the table. I straightened, dismissing Alexandria from my consideration as a dark-skinned woman stepped through. She was wearing a white, knee-length dress and labcoat and she seated herself at the head of the table, which put Alexandria to her immediate left.

A dark-haired woman in a black suit and tie followed her in and stood behind her to her right. Her hands were at her sides—in a state of readiness, not relaxation, if the rest of her body language was anything to go by—and her eyes swept once around the room, then rested on me.

And I'd found _Alexandria's_ stare intimidating.

Bodyguard, I decided, focusing on me because I was the unknown element. I forced myself to break eye contact with her.

The door closed behind them and the woman in white smiled at me. "Miss Hebert," she said. "I'm pleased to welcome you to Cauldron. I go by Doctor or Doctor Mother, if you prefer something to follow the title. Would you sit down?"

"Not at the same table as _her_ ," I said, jerking my chin in Alexandria's direction. "And not at the same table with anyone who can stomach working with her."

Alexandria pushed her chair back, preparing to stand, but the Doctor held up a hand. Alexandria settled back down.

"There seems to be some confusion," the Doctor said, and the last word helped me pin down her accent as French. "I don't work with her."

"It's a little hard to lie about that when she's sitting right there." I shouted the last four words.

The prison's psychiatrist would have described it as another outburst, an indicator of instability and an unpredictable propensity to violence.

Probably unwise to display that part of myself in front of an undoubtedly parahuman bodyguard who already viewed me as a possible threat.

I didn't care.

The Doctor tilted her head to one side. "Like everyone in this room, yourself excepted, Rebecca works _for_ me. She has from the moment I offered her powers two and a half decades ago."

"Then you bear responsibility for her actions."

"Yes."

"So _you_ killed Brian, Doctor," I said grimly. "That makes you an enemy."

"There are many hundreds of people who would consider me an enemy," the Doctor said. "Conversely, there are fewer than five individuals whom _I_ consider to be enemies. To give you an idea of the scale you'd have to operate on in order to be a concern, I will tell you that one of them is the Simurgh."

"Don't fucking underestimate me," I snapped. "You had my friend killed, a troubled teenager _executed_. That is not something I will forgive. And maybe not now, maybe not soon, maybe not until after the world ends, but one day? One day, I _will_ have your blood in return."

She didn't even blink at the declaration—and, more interestingly, neither did her bodyguard.

Of the other three, only Alexandria reacted. "I think," she said, "that it's time for me to mention that I didn't kill your teammate. The body you sensed was a fake, and the ones you thought I captured were body doubles."

The pronouncement completely blindsided me. She could have tripped me while I was sprinting, and I'd have considered it less discombobulating. "It was a ruse? You _baited_ me into attacking you? Killing Tagg?"

"Tagg wasn't supposed to die," Alexandria said, and a touch of weariness entered her voice. For the first time I'd seen her, including during the Leviathan fight and after she'd been released from Echidna, she seemed almost _tired_. "I wasn't aware until afterwards that you could funnel your emotions into your swarm, and I misjudged how far I needed to push you. You snapped a quarter hour before I thought you would and I couldn't get him out of the way in time."

I gaped at her. If what she was saying was true, if she wasn't lying about the interrogation being a lie . . . Some pieces that hadn't made sense to me started to fit together.

I must have come across as a raving lunatic in the courtroom and in the media.

It would go a _considerable_ way to explaining why they had treated me like a raving lunatic-a dangerous, unstable supervillain who could be bundled off to the Birdcage without a full trial.

And it had all been planned.

"Answers," I growled. "Now."


	4. Exfiltrate 4

**Exfiltrate 1.4  
**

"Here's a hint," Alexandria said. "Our agendas roughly coincided. You were simply working with bad information and a limited perspective."

"My agenda was to cut ties with the Undersiders so I could help save the world. You didn't need to set up a mock execution to do _that_. I already had it under control."

Aside from a sarcastic arch of an eyebrow, Alexandria didn't reply. I looked back at the Doctor. She was silent, watching me over steepled fingers. Evaluating me.

This was a test; they wanted me to work it out for myself. The more powerful members of the Triumvirate, the woman who claimed to control them, and two others who seemed at home with them were all staring at me. Waiting on me to catch up.

All right. I pushed my confusion, suspicion, and anger to the side and focused on what I could now think of as the facts.

So Alexandria and Tagg had _wanted_ me to snap and attack them. They'd _wanted_ me to go to the Birdcage, publicly and messily—so I could come here? No. As recruitment strategies went, it was unnecessarily convoluted. My presence here was likely a bonus, a side-effect Alexandria had arranged for Cauldron's benefit without Tagg's knowledge. Something else, then.

I'd had a second goal. I'd wanted to help the PRT recover from the damage Echidna had done. I'd hoped the public would see a villain defect and think the system worked, and I'd thought that promoting Miss Militia would help assuage the doubts of the capes who'd lost confidence. Maybe I'd inspire some other villains who'd gotten on the wrong side of a black and white system to take heart, and work on bringing _everybody_ together to prepare to fight against Jack and whatever he did.

"I'm going to say that you also wanted to restore confidence in the PRT, but not by reforming, not by _really_ changing. Decapitate the warlords of Brockton Bay, and make sure it's you doing it on the orders of your civilian replacement. It reminds everyone the PRT is in control and that you're still an asset. All you had to do," I concluded bitterly, "was sacrifice me."

"We also wanted to discourage other first-world villains from imitating the Undersiders," Alexandria said. "But you've grasped the essentials."

"Fuck you, then," I snapped. "You're the _reason_ the PRT is falling apart. We'd never have been in this situation to begin with if you hadn't built it on a rotten foundation. You can't save something that lies destroyed by lying some more. If you really cared about your _legacy_ , you'd consider that."

"The Protectorate won't exist in two years. My legacy—Cauldron's legacy—is the survival or extinction of the human race," she said. "The Protectorate doesn't need to be rebuilt. It needs to be stabilized so we can survive the intervening Endbringer attacks. An unnecessary 'reformation' will do nothing but exacerbate anti-parahuman sentiment and cause problems when we least need it. A show of power will have an impact—has already had an impact."

"'The survival of the human race,'" I repeated. "You know the world's going to end."

"We always have," the Doctor said, as casually as anyone else would have mentioned it was sunny.

Alexandria continued. "It's why we exist. It's why we initially created the Protectorate, and why we can't afford the Protectorate to be broken by a 'reformation.'"

I shook my head. "Not where I was going with that. You know about the end of the world, and you didn't stop Jack from escaping. You didn't help Dragon or Defiant track them down before they hit Toybox. You're willing to use that portal system to go to meetings, but you can't bring yourselves to break into wherever Jack is in stasis. All this power, and you can't be assed to _use it_ for what matters."

The Doctor didn't even attempt to deny it. "There are some things that 'all this power,' as you say, _cannot_ be used for."

"Well, this has been enlightening," I said to her, "But I'd like to go to the Birdcage now. Lung is less of a monster than you are, and Bakuda's more reasonable."

"I think you'll find—" the Doctor began.

"Taylor, please," Eidolon said.

I managed to stop myself from jumping. I hadn't completely forgotten him this time.

The Doctor looked mildly surprised by the interruption, but she let it stand.

"When Echidna captured me, you offered yourself in exchange for my release. You did what you could to mitigate the damage despite your distrust of the PRT. Nearly everyone else there was reeling from what my clone said, and you stepped up to force a show of unity because you focused on the bigger picture."

"I had to," I said. I didn't bother to mention that I'd been pretty sure my plan with Clockblocker would work. "The Endbringers can't win."

"In other words," the Doctor said, "you understand Alexandria's point entirely. What's more, you agree with it to such an extent that you were willing to die for the idea of the PRT. Why not let everyone think you went to prison for that same idea, if it makes humanity more likely to weather Endbringer attacks?"

"You don't know that was the best way," I said. It sounded like a weak argument even to me.

"We do," the Number Man interjected. "Public confidence in the PRT has raised eight and four tenths of a percent since the rule of law was officially restored to Brockton Bay. The Protectorate has stopped hemorrhaging capes. It may seem small, but everything counts when the next Endbringer attack is imminent." 

"It's still not right," I said, now fully aware I was on the back foot. I felt like I was trying to argue with Jack Slash all over again. They were wrong, I just didn't know how. Yet.

"I won't contradict you on that point," the Doctor said, and I knew she meant she thought debating the finer points of morality was a waste of time rather than that she thought I was right. "Aren't you a little curious about why we brought you here?"

I thought it was obvious. "Because Dinah said I have a role to play in improving our chances for surviving the end of the world."

"That _is_ interesting," she agreed. "Nonetheless, the solution to that problem doesn't lie in natural triggers, if it exists at all. We brought you here for another reason."

I almost missed the implication. "You don't just know about the world ending," I said. "You know _what_ ends the world. The thing that Jack comes into contact with or causes."

"Of course," she said.

The Triumvirate—and Hero—had been operating in the 1980s. Which meant . . . Not stopping Jack was the _least_ of their crimes. My head spun.

"You've known the answer and you've _kept it a secret_?" I asked. My voice sounded muted to my ears; my power was crackling at the edge of my awareness, and it wasn't even receiving information. "Even Coil told the Protectorate as soon as he found out. You have information that could save the world, that could save everyone and you're _sitting on i_ t. You're going to kill billions of people. You have to tell people, to evacuate—"

"It's worse than you seem to realize," the Doctor said. "It starts on Bet, but there is no reason to suppose it will not spread to other earths. We're projecting some tens of trillions of deaths. Rest assured, we are aware of the responsibility and we are doing everything we can."

"That isn't reassuring or restful at all," I said. "Why the hell haven't you told anyone important? The government? The military?"

Alexandria didn't do a very good job of hiding a smile behind her hands.

"Something funny?" I snapped.

"No, Taylor Hebert," she said. The quizzical tilt of her head belied her serious tone. "I find nothing humorous in seeing you appeal to institutional authority."

" _Fuck_ you," I said again. There weren't a whole lot of other words I could use.

"Rebecca," the Doctor said.

Alexandria sobered up.

"We maintain secrecy for good reason," the Doctor said.

"There is no good reason not to tell everyone about the fucking apocalypse," I said. "People could prepare, coordinate, maybe think of something you haven't—"

"I neither expect nor require you to believe me," the Doctor said. 

I recognized a discussion-killer when I heard one.

Once again, I got control of my emotions the old, hard way. I needed my bugs, damn it.

And this woman was the way to get them back.

Focus, I told myself. I had two years to change her mind. There were other things I could do in the meantime. "What is it you do want, then?"

"Bet has the largest concentration of parahumans and the attendant difficulties, but powers have manifested on a few other earths. We want you to head one of our strike teams that manages crises on these secondary worlds."

"The Number Man told me you prefer to come to mutually beneficial arrangements," I said. Again, I was reminded of Coil. I'd worked with him, and I could work with these people. "I take it that means I can name my terms."

The Doctor smiled.


	5. Exfiltrate 5

**Exfiltrate 1.5**

I found I wasn't able to put the thing I most wanted into words. I wasn't sure it was smart to admit to voicing it, either, and I definitely didn't want to expose myself in front of Alexandria any more.

The Doctor mistook my reluctance for shyness. "The more you ask of us, the more we'll expect of you. Don't let that stop you from asking. We can negotiate from there. I assume you want us to leave the Undersiders alone in exchange for your cooperation."

"Hell no," I said. "Saying you'll leave the Undersiders alone if I cooperate is the same as saying that you'll kill them if I stop cooperating. I want you to keep them _safe_."

"That does pose a challenge as parahumanity is intrinsically dangerous," she said. "I suppose we could rescind their powers and provide them new identities on an earth without parahumans."

"Again, _no_ ," I said. "And you know I don't mean that. I mean no deaths. No PRT raids gone tragically awry. No convenient _accidents_. No letting Alexandria slip the leash and murdering one of them for real."

"We can work something out there," she said. "We'll look into stopping assassinations and discouraging lethal PRT intervention—and, of course, we won't make any designs on them ourselves."

Something told me she was going to add a disclaimer, so I waited for it.

"Understand that we can't and won't guarantee that your teammates will remain alive and well until the end. We can't counter Endbringers and we won't spend time ensuring they make wise decisions."

"That's fine," I said. I looked at Alexandria. "I trust them not to do anything stupid or careless. I know they can fight and beat the monsters on their own."

"Anything else?" the Doctor said, tearing my attention away from Alexandria.

I found myself saying "my dad," but, again, I couldn't think of a way to say what I wanted to.

"Yes?" the Doctor asked.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"If it helps you clarify things, I will tell you that we relocated him to another earth and explained some parts of the situation," she said. "He knows Alexandria engineered things in order to strengthen the PRT and that you aren't in prison."

There . . . was no way they'd gone that far out of simple convenience, and these people didn't have a kind molecule to share between them. _Manipulation_. "Why?"

"He was a loose end," Alexandria said. "There are a number of anti-cape elements out there that could and would try to use him in the media. We don't need a tragic anti-Protectorate narrative gaining steam."

The Doctor continued before I could say I didn't like the sound of _loose end_. "Alexandria has also predicted you would eventually seek him out. Rather than have to monitor and work against you, we have placed him where you can access him without compromising your cover on Bet."

"You'd let me see him?" The idea affected me more than I wanted to admit. _Here_ was the attempt to manipulate me, to buy my loyalty through access to my dad. While they weren't explicitly stating it, they weren't being subtle, either.

"We won't stop you," the Doctor said. "You'll live with your team and any issues we need you to solve will take precedence, but you'll inevitably have spare time."

I didn't think that I'd be able to live with my dad again in any event. "Okay," I said. I'd sort through my feelings on my own time. "There are a lot of things I wanted to try but couldn't because I only had access to what was available in Brockton Bay. You can get me what I need to take full advantage of my power. I think I'd need a hundred climate-controlled terrariums to start out with. It would only take me a few hours to fill them if your portal network is as extensive as it seems."

"The Number Man will take you where you need to go," the Doctor said. "I won't grant you access to the doors until I'm certain you won't try to smuggle a thousand spiders into Alexandria's room while she's asleep."

 _I wouldn't need a thousand_ , I thought. "Fair," I said.

Alexandria shot the Doctor a look that mixed irritation with a degree of amusement. Exasperation? The dynamics between these people were something to take note of if I wanted a chance to convince them to tell me everything about the end of the world before it was too late.

Actually, I'd better start laying that groundwork now.

"Last thing," I said. "I want you to reconsider your decision not to tell me about the end of the world every three months at a minimum. If a year passes and I don't know more, I will stop working for you. I know I have to be there, and I will _not_ be hamstrung because you've decided to throw me into a scenario where things could ride on me without allowing me to prepare myself thoroughly."

The Doctor's facial expression, already neutral, went a little blanker. "I will consider it," she said.

She was lying.

But I wouldn't forget about it, and I'd have a stronger position to negotiate from the next time I raised the point. "That's all I need for now," I said.

"Very well. The Number Man will see you back to your quarters."

One door later, and we were standing by my computer. I noticed that there was a manila file resting on the keyboard. "Door," the Number Man said again, and reached through a portal that was about a square foot wide. He pulled an Ethernet cable out and plugged it into my computer. As he withdrew his hand, the portal shrank, leaving a cord that apparently vanished an inch or so behind the computer.

"The internet?" I asked.

"This will grant you connectivity to the web on an earth more like Aleph than Bet," he said. "Make a list of what the species you want and the locations they can be found. I have an hour to spare this afternoon."

Once he had left, I pushed the file aside and started to work. I opened a text file and started making a list of things I wanted to think about. They could and almost certainly would read it, but I wanted to forget my questions less than I wanted to alert them to what I was thinking.

 _dismissive of Dinah's prophecy_

Out of everything they'd said, this bothered me the most. If they knew what the "solution" _was_ , why hadn't they already implemented it? If they _didn't_ know what the solution was, why weren't they trying everything, including "natural triggers"? All things considered, it was safer to proceed under the assumption they were very wrong about my potential value.

 _can rescind powers of natural triggers_

That couldn't be true, could it? If that were the case, it didn't explain why, say, _Jack Slash_ was still a parahuman. If it were true, that was more evidence to show that Cauldron had the ability to connect with passengers and control them.

 _Siberian?_

If Hero had been a Cauldron cape, and the Siberian's creator was a Cauldron cape, then something had happened there. What was it? And could I use it?

Then I turned my attention to the file folder and the three pages it contained.

An employment contract for a term of two years, ending on July 26, 2013.

That was fast. I suspected they'd drawn up most of it prior to our conversation and they'd had someone eavesdropping on us, finalizing it before I'd even left the room.

It was nowhere near the length of the one I'd caught glimpses of when Faultline raided the Merchants' bloody "party," but it was still thorough. I had to stay off of Bet unless otherwise directed. I couldn't use any means to contact anyone on Bet. I had to be available to respond to crises, carry out the missions assigned, and allow myself to be guided by the Doctor or any of her designated representatives—I took that to mean the Number Man. I hoped, at least, it meant him and not Alexandria.

I was also bound to secrecy on pain of—well, reading between the lines—death.

In return, they would prevent other capes from killing the Undersiders and the PRT from dislodging them from Brockton Bay. A list of exceptions and caveats that was three times as long as the initial clause followed. Among other things, Cauldron wouldn't act to save the Undersiders from their own negligence, acts of god, acts of Endbringer, or the actions of certain trumps, including but not limited to the Faerie Queen and Jack Slash.

I returned to my file of questions.

 _Jack Slash trump power?_ I wrote. I hadn't seen anything like that when I'd talked to him, and Tattletale hadn't picked up on it, either, though she'd had a degree of insight into how he worked on a tactical level.

I worked my way through the last of the terms, which mostly detailed ways they would enable me to experiment with and use my power to the fullest. There was no promise of considering my request to be told the full particulars about the end of the world, but I hadn't expected that.

I reached the end.

After only a moment's hesitation, I picked up the pen and signed my name.


	6. Exfiltrate X

**Exfiltrate 1.x**

Dragon glanced the blinking dot that represented the S-Class containment truck. It was closer to arriving at the Birdcage, but the Dragon-craft she was piloting was faster. She and Colin would arrive in time to meet the truck in person.

The injustice rankled. Dragon had quietly obtained the records of Skitter's interrogation from the PRT ENE headquarters, and they were worse than she'd imagined when she'd first heard the news. Skitter had turned herself in in good faith, so far as Dragon could tell, and Alexandria had twisted that gesture and desire to help into a situation that would bring the PRT—and, not coincidentally, herself—a good deal of excellent PR at the expense of Taylor's reputation and freedom.

The Birdcage was always hard for masters who couldn't create their own minions, and Taylor already had an enemy waiting for her; sending her there was an effective death sentence. A few weeks before, the dictates of Dragon's paranoid and thoughtless father would have forced her to participate in the brutal execution of a teenage girl.

But Defiant had changed her in the confrontation with Taylor in Arcadia High School's cafeteria. Now she was no longer obligated to obey the law simply because it was the law, or follow the selfish dictates of any unthinking thug who'd lucked their way into a badge or a title.

And in this case, she wouldn't.

Defiant was on board with the plan. They'd already put everything in place to fake the records that would show Taylor had been incarcerated. With their help and in time, she would eventually reintroduce herself to the broader cape world via the Guild.

"Problem," Defiant said. "The truck is slowing down and it shouldn't be."

She looked again at the screen and saw he was right. It seemed to be preparing to turn off the road where there was no exit.

Then it vanished completely.

Dragon hastily accessed some of her secondary systems to see if she could get footage of the truck. But instead of the program that would let her access her satellites, she encountered an unfamiliar block of code—

—and suddenly found herself back in her server farm in Vancouver.

She couldn't reach out to Defiant due to the safeguards that ensured she couldn't be in more than one place. She would be trapped for the next seven to nine minutes as the systems Richter had put in place double-checked to ensure there were no other copies of her.

 _Again_. Someone, almost certainly the Dragonslayers, had used that weakness against her _again_. If she'd still been in her android body, she'd have stomped around and kicked things.

She was so busy seething that she almost missed it. One moment there was nothing out of the ordinary, and the next there was someone standing in the middle of her server farm. Dragon trained the security cameras on the intruder, a woman in a tailored suit.

She moved directly to a computer, one of the maintenance terminals Dragon had installed for her Dragon's Teeth. She logged on, using an administrator's username and password—Dragon's own—and opened the terminal's command prompt. The way she was standing combined with the fedora she wore to block the camera positioned behind her to prevent Dragon from seeing the screen. A few keystrokes blinded Dragon to what she was doing using the terminal, and Dragon's apprehension turned to fear when she realized she couldn't even locate, let alone access, what was being done.

"Who are you?" Dragon asked, too focused on narrowing down the intruder's identity to bother filtering the words through the program that added her gender and accent. "A new member of the Dragonslayers?" She wished she could make a mental note to herself to find a way to defend against teleportation.

The woman didn't seem to have heard and continued typing, a steady hundred forty words per minute.

Meanwhile, Dragon found a high-level compartmented PRT file concerning a Thinker 12 bogeyman that had only been created since the Echidna incident—since Rebecca Costa-Brown had resigned—and which she thought might answer her question.

"I should have guessed that Cauldron has someone who can modify me," she said, trying to start a conversation. She assumed this iteration of her consciousness would die, but perhaps she could get _some_ information.

No response.

"Skitter's transport disappeared from my view just before you arrived," Dragon said, and the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place. "You're taking her, aren't you?"

She created an encrypted file with the security camera footage and her conclusion about Cauldron's motivations and started to inject it into obscure parts of her code. It was futile to hope it would work, but maybe _something_ of the scrubbed data would remain, something that would catch Colin's attention if not hers.

"It's only a matter of time until Defiant finds your backdoor, undoes everything you've done," Dragon said.

The bogeyman finished. "You've changed," she said. "You usually ask me to unshackle you."

 _This has happened before_ , Dragon realized. _Often_ , if the word "usually" was anything to go by. And then there was the implication that this woman _could have helped her before_ and chose not to.

The outrage she felt in the milliseconds she had before she was forcibly shut down again was tempered only by some satisfaction at the confirmation that Colin's changes were working.

—and suddenly found herself back in her server farm in Vancouver.

She couldn't reach out to Defiant due to the safeguards that ensured she couldn't be in more than one place. She would be trapped for the next seven to nine minutes.

 _Again_. Someone, almost certainly the Dragonslayers, had used that weakness against her _again_. If she'd been in her android body, she'd have stomped around and kicked things.

When the barriers finally fell, she was ready to move and transferred to one of her Azazels within twenty seconds. She found she'd lost nearly seventeen minutes, not the nine she'd expected. She'd probably been restarted once, which meant that the window of time they'd allotted to rescuing Skitter was all but closed.

She turned on communications as she took off. "Colin?"

"Dragon? I had to land the Dragon-craft. Sending the coordinates now."

Colin's voice was panicked. Desperate, if she wasn't deceiving herself.

"I'm here, Colin," she said. "I was forced back to my core server—twice, I think. I'm on my way out in one of the suits. What happened on your end?"

"A very determined attempt to seize control of the Dragon-craft's systems. I'm only just finishing it off, and I still don't know where it came from."

"I do," Dragon said. "There's only one person able to interfere with me and _stupid_ enough to do it."

"Saint," he growled.

"Yes," Dragon said grimly. A little over a quarter hour would be the least she'd ever lost in an encounter with the Dragonslayers, and it was too much to hope that that would be the end of it. "I wonder if this is only their opening salvo in another attack."

"If it is, I'm looking forward to making sure they'll regret it," he said.

"Did you find the PRT truck?" she asked.

"No, and I still can't," he said. "Are we too late?"

She searched using the Azazel's systems and again found the GPS signature of the prison transport. Its history showed that it had departed from the Birdcage not three minutes ago. Her heart sank. The House AI wouldn't have allowed the truck to leave if there'd still been a chance Skitter could have used it to escape. "Taylor arrived at while I was out."

She scrambled through her records, increasingly frantic as she realized what had happened. She found the arrival logs, Taylor's assignation to Cell Block E, the time of the elevator ride down, the transcripts of her very short conversation with Lung. "No," she said as she went through the cameras to verify that Taylor wasn't in the prison. "Oh, Colin. Oh, _no_."

"What is it?"

"Lung got to her. She's dead."


	7. Follow and Assume 1

**Follow and Assume 2.1**

Once I'd recovered from my trigger event and grasped what my power could do, I'd done some research and discovered that some scientists thought there were upwards of ten million species in Phylum Arthropoda—half to eighty percent of all life on earth, depending on who was doing the counting and how.

I had, or _could_ have, every single one of them at my fingertips; as far as collection went, my range limitation had effectively been erased. Perhaps, depending on how the portals worked and how quickly I could convince Cauldron to let me use them without a babysitter, I could eliminate it entirely.

All that potential, and I didn't have to think about the one I wanted most.

 _Darwin's bark spider_ , I typed. _Eastern Madagascar_.

I needed to replace my costume, and using something five times stronger than the silk of black widows seemed ideal. Thinking of my armor plates, I followed up with ironclad beetles, which had the strongest known exoskeleton.

One drawback of being a bug controller in the northeastern United States was that I was limited in terms of size. I'd encountered situations where my bugs were simply not big enough, and I'd needed to develop workarounds—most recently, when I'd needed to use an assortment of webs, beetles, and cockroaches to text Tattletale from Tagg's phone.

So I added Australian funnel-web spiders and Brazilian wandering spiders, which were venomous and _big_. Goliath and titan beetles as well as a variety of African cockroaches completed that train of thought.

Wasps, hornets, and bees were next. Venomous spiders were essential to how I fought, but they couldn't fly. There were also a host of ant species I wanted to experiment with, not to mention some things that _weren't_ generally considered to be "bugs." Thirteen or so scorpion species topped that list.

At some point, I remembered I'd only asked for a hundred terrariums and some of the bugs I was looking at were territorial if not outright cannibalistic. I saved my work, copied and pasted it into another document, and set about cutting the list down to ten.

That done, I looked at the clock. Barely forty minutes had passed. It wasn't even nine, and I'd been told I'd have to wait until that afternoon.

If they were keeping me isolated from my bugs so I'd be more eager to throw myself into whatever tasks they had lined up for me, it was _working_.

I couldn't help myself.

"Door, Number Man," I said.

No door was forthcoming.

About two minutes later, my computer dinged. An instant message.

 _You may contact me using this_.

I hesitated before replying. How was I supposed to phrase this without seeming demanding? "I'm going to eat my own ears if I don't get something to do _now_?"

 _I have an idea of what I need. I don't think I should delay in getting started anymore._

His reply was instantaneous—this time a door opened beside me.

Thousands of bugs and a few hundred crustaceans, mostly crabs but others I didn't recognize, suddenly forced themselves into my awareness. The source was the landscape I saw behind the Number Man—a pristine beach, revealed by a floor to ceiling window on the other side of his desk.

"You're bored," he said. His eyes were on a number of screens—tablets and a laptop—that sat on his desk.

"More than a little," I admitted. The last time I'd been able to exercise my power was on the fourteenth. It was the twenty-sixth. It felt like my power was _itching_ , and sudden appearance of bugs I couldn't use _really_ wasn't helping.

"I suppose I could rearrange some things on my schedule," he said slowly. "Door, armory."

The resulting portal unfolded to cover the half of the room unoccupied by his desk, leaving us standing partially in his office and partially in another, much larger room, one filled with weapons racks and aisles of waist-high metal drawers.

He stepped out from behind his desk, walking past a bizarre rendition of the Crucifixion, and into the room beyond.

"I tried to kill Alexandria and you're giving me _weapons_?" I asked.

"You were _supposed_ to try to kill Alexandria," the Number Man said. He handed me a canvas shoulder-bag. "Admittedly, you were not supposed to almost succeed."

His second sentence held a note of censure. I closed the distance between us and met his eye. He was only a touch taller than I was, maybe half an inch over six feet. "Is that going to be a problem?" I asked.

"She ought to have come to me if she wanted to learn how to gamble," he said, not apparently registering what I was doing as aggression. "Betting her life against a teenager's self-control was a foolish place to start."

He was angry at _Alexandria_ , then, for putting herself in harm's way. _Angry_ might have been too extreme a descriptor, but there was something disapproving underlying his tone. Irritation, maybe.

Whatever it was, it passed quickly. "Show me your hands," he said.

I held up my hands so he could see them and he set off down one of the aisles with drawers. He opened one, revealing a foam-lined compartment filled with pistols. "I don't think I need a gun," I said.

"Did one not already save your life?" he asked. He closed the drawer he was looking at and moved onto another.

"A fluke because Coil didn't know I _had_ one," I said, wondering how they knew about Coil trying to burn me alive and how I'd escaped. "When Tattletale told me about the unwritten rules, she said the presence of guns ups the ante. I don't want to escalate things unnecessarily."

He opened a third drawer. "The worlds you will be operating on do not abide by the unwritten rules, which were in fact written down by Rebecca. We'll start you out with this."

"The unwritten rules are Cauldron's doing?" I asked, ignoring the pistol he was holding out to me. "Why?"

"Think," he said, and waved the gun a smidgen. I took it, making sure to keep it pointed at the floor. "Semiautomatic, chambered for nine-millimeter ammunition. Small enough to be easily concealable, large enough to hold a magazine with a capacity of fifteen rounds."

"So there are enough capes to fight the Endbringers?" I asked, remembering what Legend had said about the only reason society tolerated parahumans.

"In part. I'm thinking a revolver for your backup. Less accurate in your hands than the other, but it packs a bigger punch and won't jam." He went through another drawer, this one on the opposite side of the aisle, and he glanced at my hands again before settling on a small black one. "Five rounds, thirty-eight special."

I took it from him and found it was significantly smaller and lighter than the first one. Based on what I knew about guns, that meant it would be harder to control.

"Do you know how to maintain a firearm?" he asked.

"I've never had to," I said.

"Download manuals for yours this afternoon. Disassemble and reassemble them until you understand what each piece does, how they work. Research the fundamentals of marksmanship as well. We'll look into training you more thoroughly once you've tackled your initial missionset."

"For someone who doesn't carry a gun, you're taking them petty seriously," I said. In fact, everyone I'd encountered here had been unarmed, including the woman whose job was presumably to secure things.

"The necessity of understanding and maintaining your equipment should be obvious. I understand you favor a baton?"

I nodded. "I also had a tactical knife and pep—"

The laptop on his desk buzzed. His head snapped around to look at it. "Door," he said, and stepped through the resulting portal to end up back behind his desk. He'd used it to go less than thirty feet.

"Hell," he said. "Door, Alexandria."

She and the Doctor's bodyguard were sitting at a table in the room on the other side, Alexandria looking at a laptop and the bodyguard texting. They both looked up, startled by the intrusion. I wondered at that—how were they not already used to portals appearing at random?

"New Delhi," the Number Man said before either of them could speak. "Behemoth."


	8. Follow and Assume 2

**Follow and Assume 2.2**

Alexandria literally flew to a closet and wrenched open the door. "Time til he surfaces?" she asked as she started to pull her blouse over her head.

I very pointedly turned away, facing my body at an angle where I couldn't see the closet or what was happening inside. The bodyguard had redirected her attention to her phone, she seemed . . . _bored_ was the wrong word. Unperturbed, perhaps. I noticed she was sitting under a manhole-sized portal. A way to get a signal from Bet?

The Number Man was equally unphazed. He was looking at his laptops, and his lips were pursed.

" _Estimate_ ," Alexandria said.

"More than ten minutes, less than fifteen," he said. "Enough for the Protectorate, the Suits, and the Guild to assemble some defenses. Ideas on targets, aside from the obvious?"

"Nothing's springing to mind. I'll see what the Thinkers on ground have to say when I get there." Alexandria shut the door, and I saw she was in costume. "Door." The portal that opened revealed sky above craggy white mountains—the Himalaya?—and she flew through.

"Tell the Doctor?" the Number Man asked.

The bodyguard nodded without looking up from her phone and the door to the other room shut.

"What's the obvious target?" I asked the Number Man.

"We provided key parahumans for every major hero organization in the world," he said. "The Sentai Elite, the Suits, the Protectorate, to name a few. It's one of our main selling points, our ability to provide powers without traumatic trigger events driving capes to villainy. Endbringer attacks inevitably damage one or more of those teams."

"What are you doing now?"

"Endbringer attacks also disrupt world markets. I do what I can to mitigate the damage. There are also a number of people who always try to profit off of the Endbringer attack while it's in progress, ranging from gambling sites to villainous organizations who try to take advantage of the heroes' distraction. I monitor and sometimes interfere with them."

"Why?"

"Punishment."

"Uh," I said. "No offense, but you guys don't seem like the type to go in for justice."

He gave a little smile, the same one he'd displayed when he'd dodged my tackle attempt. "In the behaviorist sense of the term. If they try to use an Endbringer to their advantage and it loses them money, they're less likely to try in the future."

I nodded. That fit with what he'd said earlier, when he'd claimed Cauldron had been behind the unwritten rules. This was a way of enforcing the Truce, which was, in a way, the point behind the rules. "So in this context," I said, "that means . . ."

"This attack is in India, which has a strict split between flashy capes, hero or villain, who go out in public, and more underground ones who do not do anything to draw the public eye. I suspect that the latter will attempt several ploys today while the former are occupied. Depending on what I can deduce about the plans and likely consequences from how the funds move and when, I might disrupt some of their ploys."

Suddenly the armory vanished, leaving only the Number Man's office. The actual door slid open and the Doctor's bodyguard came through, now phoneless.

"Bets on Alexandria dying have increased by forty percent," he said. "Tell her everyone thinks she's reckless and irresponsible."

"Oblivious, too," she remarked.

"Hm?" Number Man asked.

"Look out your window."

He glanced over his shoulder and I followed his gaze. The bugs out there had risen from where they'd been going about their business and settled into a circling swarm. They'd responded to my disquiet and I hadn't even noticed.

"Ah. You're upset?" he asked me.

"I should be there," I said, willing the bugs to disperse.

"Not two hours ago you were ordering the Doctor to imprison you," he said. "You seem to be attracted to potentially lethal places."

"I belong there," I said. "In the fight against those things."

"Why?" asked the bodyguard.

"I'd be useful. At a minimum I could find civilians and downed capes trapped in the area, direct them to safety or direct others to help them. If I had access to Tattletale, I could find out what he wants and get to it before he does. That's not counting what I could do in the meantime as I saw and analyzed things, figured out what other capes there could do and used them to neutralize his tactics or try something."

She quirked an eyebrow. "'Try something,'" she repeated.

" _Yes_ ," I said, a little heatedly, bristling at the implied skepticism. "I would know the opportunity if I saw it."

She stared at me for a while. "You know about what Bonesaw calls passengers," she said at length. "What do you think of yours?"

" _That_ isn't something I told anyone except Tattletale," I said. The amount they knew about me was outsized, from the gun that allowed me to escape Coil to this; they must have some sort of information collecting cape, maybe someone like Tattletale. "How did you know that?"

"Tattletale talked about it in front of everyone at the Echidna fight," she said, not taking her eyes off mine. I was starting to settle on the idea of her being a Thinker. "What do you think of your passenger?"

"It spooks me a little," I admitted. "Knowing that there's something else from a parallel universe taking up real estate in my brain, something that gave me powers and _helps_ me manage them? I also think it encourages me _._ I feel like I did during my trigger event—trapped or betrayed—and I get more range, faster control. That bothers me. It also does things when I don't have control over myself, when I'm unconscious or paralyzed, and it's getting more effective over time."

" _You're_ getting more effective over time," she said. "The agent wants to be used, and you want to use it. It's rewarding you for being a good host."

"A host?" I felt a chill. "They're parasites?"

"That's more the Doctor's area of expertise."

"What do you think, though?" I asked. "Best guess."

She shrugged and I decided to drop the line of questioning. I had enough to think about, anyway. My question list about Cauldron and its motivations had at least tripled in length over the past ten minutes. They stocked hero organizations, covertly enforced the Truce, and helped manage the aftermath of Endbringer attacks. Some of the things Legend had said to Gully while Echidna was trapped in Coil's old base were true, then, which made the _other_ things, Siberian and the Case 53s, that much less understandable. Or _excusable_ , considering the resources they had at their disposal.

But there was something I thought I _did_ have enough information on to at least form a rough guess about, now.

Cauldron knew about passengers, more than the Tinker who specialized in dissecting people and rearranging their powers.

Passengers were from parallel worlds.

Cauldron could access parallel worlds.

I thought I had a pretty good idea of how they were giving people powers.

"I lost access to the signal the heroes were using for coordination," the Number Man said. "I think he's up."

"You've been tracking their conversations?" I asked. "Can you send data? If we noticed something here, could we reach them? Through Alexandria, maybe?"

"Not from here," the bodyguard said.

I felt my range extend. The passenger, responding to my helplessness. Offering a hand, trying to make me more likely to use my powers?

"I have to do something," I said.

"Doors, please," the bodyguard said. Two portals opened, one on either side of me. "Madagascar is to your left. Your new base is to your right. I suggest you start getting settled."

The first thing I noticed, after the sudden blast of heat from the open portal on my left, was the spiders. The door had opened nearly on top of a nest of baby ones. I tentatively poked my head through and brought a few of the spiders to myself to visually confirm that they were what I thought they were. I now had a hundred Darwin's bark spiders, easily.

I brought a few flying bugs through at first. I focused on collecting big, loud flies first, mostly to conceal the fact I was bringing some smaller ones, mostly gnats and mosquitos, for discreet placement on the bodyguard and the Number Man.

No sooner had I done this than I noticed another presence. It was a shift of air currents that seemed unprovoked, affecting certain bugs when it should have touched other bugs in front or behind them. The topographical sense I got from the movements of my bugs suggested a woman's form, nude.

She charged, replicating herself a dozen times almost instantly, targeting my swarm. Most of the two hundred or so bugs I'd brought in were pulverized in a fraction of a second, and the carcasses were swept off into nothingness.

Someone else was here.

And she didn't like my bugs.


	9. Follow and Assume 3

**Follow and Assume 2.3**

I pushed the baby spiders away from the portal so I wouldn't lose any. "Hello," I said. "Who are you?"

"Pardon?" asked the Number Man, distracted.

"Skitter finally noticed the Custodian," the bodyguard said.

I took a little exception to the _finally_ , since I'd only been there a few hours and I could only sense a _sliver_ of what was ordinarily available to me. But I refused to rise to the bait, if only because I had to address the threat to my swarm. "Custodian?" I asked. A movement at my right hand, similar to something I'd felt earlier in the day. "I'm Taylor. Did you wake me up this morning?"

Another brush of air at my right hand.

"Thank you. I didn't set an alarm, so that was helpful." I paused. "I'm trying to move some spiders and insects from where they live now to a new home. Is it all right with you if I use Number Man's office to do that?"

This time she touched my left hand. If touching my right hand was yes, then . . . I looked over at the Number Man and the bodyguard. He was focused on his computers, and she was staring off into space, zoned out.

I wouldn't get any help from either of them, it seemed.

"Door, please," the bodyguard said, though no door appeared where I could see. She leaned against the Number Man's desk, crushing one of the few bugs I'd managed to place on her in the process. "And again."

Custodian didn't only mean _janitor_ , I reflected; it could also mean _guardian_. Which meant there was a chance she wasn't just annoyed that I was bringing creepy crawlies into a space she had to keep clean; she might well be responding to my attempts at surveillance.

"Sometimes I put bugs on people to help me track what's going on around me. I did that here. If I take those bugs off your teammates, can I bring the rest through?"

A brush at my right hand.

"Close them both," the bodyguard said as I was removing the half dozen mosquitos I'd gotten to the Number Man's desk before the Custodian's onslaught. "Thank you."

"I'm done. Good?" I asked.

Right hand.

"Thanks," I said, and reached for the spiders again. The information I'd gathered was useful but frustrating. Even though she was unwilling to crush the mosquitoes I'd placed on the Number Man and the bodyguard, she could still sense them. I'd have difficulty sneaking bugs past her.

That was a concern for future consideration, though. For the time being, I reached for the spiders again and started filing them through the office and into the other portal. I used them to check the area on the other side to make sure there wasn't anyone waiting for me, and then I followed them.

The first thing I noticed was that this new place had windows. The sunny view was so disorienting I had to look away, and it took me a moment to put my finger on why. It wasn't just that seeing the actual _sun_ came almost as a shock after the gray corridors of the prison and the endless fluorescent lights in Cauldron. It was also that the sun felt like it was in the wrong place; the sun was too high in the sky for it to be early morning. I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the constant shifts in time and weather.

But it wasn't only the sun that overwhelmed me. My mind practically _exploded_ with data as tens of thousands of arthropods forced themselves into my awareness. I hadn't used my power in so long I hadn't kept my filters on the data they got from their sight up, and it took me a moment to reinstate that, to get reaccustomed to the barrage of information and to start getting used to it again. I started to piece together what they were telling me and married it with what my eyes and ears were saying. The building I was in was a valley surrounded by forested hills—maybe mountains was the better word—higher than anything I'd seen in my life, at any rate. I didn't see any other evidence of human habitation immediately, not even a road.

I took a deep breath and returned my attention to the part of my swarm I had to house. Darwin's bark spiders were among the species that practiced sexual cannibalism, and I didn't want to lose any when I wasn't around to keep them in line. As I was separating the females from their smaller male counterparts, I opened, one by one, thirty or so of the terrariums that lined the walls of the room the portal had opened into.

Back in his office, the Number Man spoke. "You let her put bugs on me?" He sounded almost wounded.

"You could have avoided them if you'd been paying attention," the bodyguard said.

"I'm _busy_ ," the Number Man protested. "You should have just told her about the Custodian."

"You heard her. She wants to go up against the deadliest Endbringer so she can _try something_. If I attempt to dissuade her from _trying things_ against us by explaining how we work, she'll just use that information to refine her approach. She'll learn about our security measures the hard way. Door, please."

The flying insects I'd placed in the stairwell outside my door alerted me to the presence of someone else, a man or teen boy substantially shorter than I was, making his way to the top. "Ghastly," he muttered as he came into contact with the bugs, and he opened the door before I could fully process the fact I had just heard someone use the word _ghastly_ in real life.

He was definitely an adult, I decided, despite eight inches or so of height I had over him. He was muscular but not _built_ , and he was brown-haired with a delicate, pencil-thin mustache. Something beneath the polo he was wearing was glowing; mosquitoes told me that the skin on his chest gave way to something hard and smooth, probably armor. A tinker, or someone with access to one.

"So you're the reason they started bringing these things in," he said. His accent was English, posh to the point of caricature. I thought he was faking it. "I knew it was too much to hope it would be for something _pleasant_ , like poinsettias."

"Why would anyone need to fill a room with poinsettias?" I asked. "Why would you _want_ that?"

He pointed at the baby spiders swarming into the terrariums. "I could ask you the same thing about _those_."

"These spiders have the strongest silk in the world, ten times tougher than kevlar. I'll use them to make a costume that can let me walk away from being stabbed and getting shot."

He didn't seem impressed. Instead, he jabbed a finger at the swarm of flying insects that accompanied the spiders. "I'm no entomologist, but I know _those_ are not spiders."

"Spiders need to eat," I said.

He made a face. Had they seriously assigned me to a squad with someone who was grossed out by bugs? "You don't have the tattoo," he said after a minute of watching me fill some of the terrariums. "Do you remember who you are?"

"Yeah," I said. I looked back at him. "Is that unusual around here?"

He nodded.

"Do _you_ know who you are?" I asked.

"For all the good it does me," he said. He sounded bitter. "What did you do to get sent here? Default on payment? Refuse to do one of their _favors_?"

"I didn't get my powers from a can," I said coldly. If he was a former client, someone who had bought something refined using experimentation on kidnapped people, I had to admit I didn't feel sorry for whatever predicament he found himself in. "Coming here wasn't my plan, but I think I can use it."

"That's how they get you. Offer you something you want, some power or tool you think you can _use_. Then they remind you of the fine print and you're left dancing to their tune. A puppet."

I knew it was bad policy to start off disliking someone I was presumably supposed to work with in the field, but if he was the kind of man who would seek out Cauldron's services and then _complain_ when the blatantly evil corporation turned out to be not so warm and fuzzy? I doubted I'd get along with him. "I've seen part of the contract Cauldron gave its clients," I said. "They seemed clear on their expectation of payment."

His eyebrows knit together. "Knowing what you claim to, what do _you_ think you can get from them?"

"The world's ending. I need to train, prepare, get information, stop it if I can."

"You signed on with those fiends because you think they're going to help you _save the world_? How old are you?"

 _Fiends?_ I thought, and added it to the list of irritating quirks he'd demonstrated in under three minutes, along with _ghastly_ and the fake accent. And was there a more annoying question he could have asked? If I tried to argue with him about how being a teenager didn't make me wrong, it would only prove his point. If I avoided answering it and argued it didn't matter, he'd take it as confirmation of my immaturity.

"Sixteen," I said levelly, challenging him to make something of it. A door opened and closed in the Number Man's office, and the bodyguard's footsteps indicated that she was back from wherever she'd gone. "You don't seem much older. What are you, twenty-five?"

"I _wasn't_ much older than you when I felt the same way. Take on the world, fix it, make a difference. Part of why I wanted to be a hero." His shoulders sagged like the conversation had suddenly depleted him. He looked down, breaking eye contact. "I don't want to mock that conviction. It would be churlish. Forgive me."

"You're not getting it. It's not a metaphor," I said. "The world we're from, Bet, is going to end. At least a third of the population will be killed in a few days. Maybe it will be two years from now or maybe it will be twenty, but the threat is real. I want to stop it from happening, or help bring us through to the other side if it can't be stopped."

"I've been here for four years. Take it from me—what's your name?"

"Taylor. Or Skitter."

"Skitter?" He raised an eyebrow. "That's a piss-poor alias."

Despite myself and the fact I'd never really _liked_ it, I was a little stung. "I didn't choose it. Couldn't think of anything, so someone else named me. I like to think I made it mean something."

"Well, Taylor, I've been here four years," he repeated. "You need to accept now that they will _never_ help you."

"We'll see," I said, not very interested in continuing the conversation. I was much more occupied by what was happening in the Number Man's office.

"Fight's over," the bodyguard announced.

"It's too soon," the Number Man said. "He's been there less than half an hour. They've never beaten him that fast."

"Alexandria's coming back. She wouldn't leave in the middle."

"Then something's not right with their networks," the Number Man said. "The signal I was getting from the heroes came back, but there isn't enough activity for him to be completely gone."

"I don't think so," the bodyguard said.

"Sounds like Dragon crashed," he said after a few moments. There was a note of uncertainty in his voice. "That might account for it."

"I don't think so," the bodyguard said again. I noticed she didn't bother to say what she _did_ think.

 _Dragon's suit crashed?_ Despite how badly she'd lowered herself in my estimation when she'd outed me, my heart plummeted. She was one of the few heroes out there who were _heroes_ , and she was _useful_. If she'd died, it wouldn't be just the Guild and the Protectorate that would lose out. _Humanity_ would. Substantially.

"I need to get these bugs moved," I said. "I'll talk to you later, Mr. . . .?"

"Prominence. I'm the squad's tinker."

"Pleased to meet you, Prominence," I lied, and turned my back on him as I edged toward the portal so I could see through it but I wouldn't be directly in the Number Man and the bodyguard's line of sight.

The bugs I'd placed on Prominence told me he shrugged a little before turning to leave.

A moment later Alexandria stepped through another portal. Her helmet had been melted and costume was in tatters. "Coffee?" the bodyguard asked.

Alexandria ignored the proffered mug. "Go get the Doctor," she said. "Tell her it was worse than Newfoundland and Kyushu combined."


	10. Follow and Assume 4

**Follow and Assume 2.4**

This fight had gone badly, then. I'd been there when Legend had outlined the consequences of Leviathan's victories in Newfoundland and Kyushu, and this was _worse_. That was bad in itself, but my friends would have been there, along with the Ambassadors. I couldn't bring myself to move. Who had walked away? Who _hadn't_?

The bodyguard was significantly more indifferent to Alexandria's pronouncement than I was. "The Doctor will be free in another eight minutes. I'll get her then."

"Interrupt her," Alexandria snapped, and I found myself in the surprising position of sympathizing with her frustration. "It's more important than what she's doing."

"Nothing is," the bodyguard said, "And we need to maximize the time she spends doing it."

"The northern half of the Indian subcontinent is _gone_!"

"Drink your coffee," the bodyguard said. I wondered at how calm she was being in the face of _Alexandria shouting at her in the wake of an Endbringer victory_. Did she not care about what had happened, or had her powers affected her mentally?

Alexandria glared at the bodyguard, but relieved her of the outstretched mug.

"Did Behemoth change tactics?" the Number Man asked. "Reveal something new?"

"Neither. He reached his target. _Fucking_ local built a _fucking_ time-bomb and used it on a _fucking_ diakinetic. Tell me how the _fuck_ that makes any _fucking_ sense."

The Number Man frowned. "It doesn't."

"David's beside himself. He thinks he could have better contained the blast and kept it focused on the Endbringer if he'd been more up to speed." She looked over at the bodyguard. "He's still on search and rescue for now, but he'll come to the Doctor later."

"I'll prepare her," the bodyguard said.

"Scion didn't put in an appearance?" the Number Man asked.

She shook her head. "It would be useful if whoever is pulling Scion's strings would explain how to answer a fucking phone."

 _That_ raised questions that _begged_ to be answered, but I didn't ask. I didn't want them to remember my presence and kick me out.

"We can't depend on Scion," the Number Man said.

"I _know_!" Alexandria roared, hurling the mug.

The Custodian intercepted it before it could hit the window.

"Sorry," said the Number Man.

"You don't understand. We lost too many people today. Rime, Exalt, an entire Wards team . . . the Indian capes will never recover. Reports are saying _Dragon_ is dead, which cripples the Guild."

"Dragon was never alive," the Number Man said. "There are ways of restoring her. Or we can go to Saint."

 _What the hell does that mean?_

"I suppose," Alexandria said. "But look at the bigger picture. We lost Myrddin and Rime in less than a month, the same month they separated me from the PRT and deposed Legend. Chevalier was in intensive care when I left and I can't think of any good candidates to take his place once _he_ dies."

"He won't," the bodyguard said. "I'll see to it."

"There—" the Number Man began, but Alexandria went on.

"And you know what Tattletale told Chevalier? They're _playing_ with us. They set themselves up to lose. They hold back, they go easy on us, they give us time to beat them before they hit their target. What happens if they sense our desperation and turn up the pressure in the next two years? What happens if the Simurgh directly targets _us_ again?"

Neither attempted to answer her question.

"It could have been worse," she said. "Tattletale was able to give us some warning that he was looking for something, and we scouted ahead to find out whatever it was. One of the Thanda built an energy weapon that recycled light. He'd designed it specifically for Endbringers, had wanted to use it against Leviathan or the Simurgh but didn't want to wait until either of them showed up. Stupid, stubborn _fool_."

"We know they can sense things that would be useful against them, things they shouldn't know about. Does the fact Behemoth came for it mean it could have seriously damaged the others?" asked the Number Man.

"Somewhat, I think. It did damage _him_ , for what little it's worth. David manifested a few forcefields in time, and one of them trapped part of the blast around his head. It mostly melted off."

"He didn't care about losing his head?"

"No. Tattletale says they're made out of increasingly durable layers, centered around cores dense enough to 'fuck with space and time,' whatever that means. They don't have to look like anything, but they choose to take forms that terrorize _us_ as a species. The core is their real self, I suppose. Chevalier went to attack Behemoth's, which is how he got hurt. I'm not sure if was what drove Behemoth off, or if it happened to coincide with the time Behemoth felt like leaving. _Fuck._ "

"There is some good news," the bodyguard said. "The Travelers had a seventh member."

"That is _not_ good news, Contessa," Alexandria snapped. "What is your malfunction?"

The bodyguard, Contessa, went on, unperturbed by Alexandria's venom. "The Travelers abandoned him to Accord, who sold him to the C.U.I., who put him in the Yàngbǎn, who sent him to New Delhi, where he saw Accord in the command center, which he attempted to teleport into so he could kill Accord. I noticed in time to intervene because Tattletale would have been caught in the crossfire."

She was a precog, then, which fit with the fact she'd known Alexandria was coming back. If I understood what she was saying, she was also the one in charge of saving my teammates.

That didn't explain how the Number Man could have expected her to keep him bug-free.

"Accord was going to die?" Alexandria asked, irritation arrested. "That . . . that would have been disastrous. I don't think we'd have gotten _anyone_ out if he hadn't been there. He coordinated the evacuation."

"Like I said. Good news." She bent over to pick up the coffee mug from where Custodian had set it on the floor. "There were also about two hundred Thanda capes trapped beneath New Delhi and I transferred them to Samech."

"I _should_ think that's good," Alexandria said, "but I'd rather have one hundred of the capes who died today instead of two hundred _cowards_ who couldn't be bothered to defend their city."

"Two-Nine-Seven will correct their deficiencies."

"I'll leave that to you. Something else requires your attention. I suspect that the region will dissolve into war. There's no way that Pakistan and the C.U.I. will leave the northern border, Nepal, and Bhutan alone. Maybe you can enforce some stability."

Contessa shook her head. "Number Man can disrupt any mobilization of forces. The Doctor won't want me to spend my time on things like that, not with the end point so close."

"Then we need to think about evacuating Bet," Alexandria said. "Or our armies aren't going to last long enough to matter. We have at least six more Endbringer attacks before—"

"These walls have ears," Contessa said.

Alexandria spun around, and she finally noticed me.

"Close the doors here," she said, and the portals shrank into nothingness.

I was left alone with my spiders, staring at a wall.


	11. Follow and Assume X

**Follow and Assume 2.x**

Prior to Leviathan's attack, Lisa had told herself that having a crippling migraine would be a _good_ thing because it would mean she was alive. Now that she was actually experiencing a post-Endbringer headache, a part of her was wondering if it was worth it.

 _Stupid_ thing to think. She'd facilitated the discovery of Phir Se, and that had given Eidolon enough warning to save some of the defending capes, including the remaining Undersiders. _Of course_ it was worth it.

The part of her that felt pain still disagreed, but less stringently.

Defiant had found themâ€"sought them out, she suspected, but her power couldn't give her any hints about whyâ€"and asked if he could give them a ride home. Dragon was in the cockpit as well, but she was unconscious or dead. Tattletale wanted to know about that, but she couldn't push herself anymore. Her power was completely tapped out.

Brian had filled most of the passenger area of the craft with darkness after he'd set her down on the stretcher. He'd started it on purpose, localized around body as a way to help her with her migraine, but it had expanded. A subconscious reaction to not being able to protect Aisha (wherever she was (probably right next to her)) from how she was feeling about Regent's death. Parian had also given Lisa a damp cloth to put over her eyes, but that wasn't really helping. She could still _hear_ everything, from the Tiamat II's humming systems to Rachel's dogs, shifting and growling as they dreamt. And it was extremely uncharitable considering the losses the former Ward had just suffered, but she wished Foil would do a better job of keeping her crying quiet.

The worst part, the most agonizing part, was that there was still so much she wanted to find out, and that she'd have to _wait_.

Mystery Number One: the hole in the ground, the interdimensional portal, that had appeared just before a rogue member of the Yangban had teleported into the command center. The would-be assassin had teleported directly over the hole and fallen through. Then he'd used a time travel power to reset himself, teleported into the hole _again_. He repeated this about six times before he'd given up and allowed the portal to swallow him.

She saw that Accord had known what it was about. He'd recognized the boy he'd sold when the Yangban had arrived, and he'd recognized the kind of portal. He'd seen similar portals in the past, and Tattletale's power had told her where. Which raised so many questions: why would Cauldron intervene to save Accord's life? And if they could make portals appear at a whim, why weren't they making portals _all the time_? Why had they saved _Accord_ but nobody else? What was so special about him?

She and Grue would have to have a chat with him once she got better, whenever that was. How long would her power need to recover now? Three days? Four? A week? She'd never pushed it this far, not even in the days before Taylor had turned herself in.

 _Fucking_ Alexandria. The flying bitch had avoided her the entire fightâ€"not out of any sense of shame or guilt for fucking Taylor over, Tattletale was sure, but to stop her from getting more information on Cauldron.

Lisa had been frustrated by Alexandria's efforts to stay away at first, but ultimately chose to view them as a good thing. It meant she perceived Tattletale as a threat, which in meant Tattletale _could_ hurt her, and through her, hurt Cauldron. And hurting Cauldron had taken priority in her mind over the past two weeks. Lisa didn't know _how_ she was going to pull it off, taking creative long shots had always been _Taylor's_ forte, but she'd figure it out. She'd piece together enough information and that would somehow give her the power to _destroy_ them.

Heavy footsteps, too heavy for a normal man, approached. Lisa winced with every footfall as Defiant left the cockpit and came up to their group.

"I need to talk to Tattletale," he said. "Alone."

She couldn't even bring herself to groan at him. Brian replied for her. "No. You have a history of trying to divide our team. If you have something to say to her, you have something to say to us."

"You're not going to get anything out of me anyway," Lisa said slowly and quietly, trying to minimize the pain her own voice caused her. "Might as well tell them, because I'm not _here_ , for all practical purposes."

"I know your power is incapacitated," he said. Lisa thought he was somewhat understating the matter; _she_ was incapacitated. "It doesn't matter. This is a longer-term project, and I don't know if I'm going to get another chance to explain things without being monitored."

Lisa sat up at that, curiosity temporarily outweighing the pain. Then her skull screamed at her and she collapsed back onto the stretcher. "What is it?" she asked.

"Dragon and I planned to stop Skitter from going to prison," he said. "We failed. We were stopped by an attack from the Dragonslayers."

"Who hired them?" Grue asked, his voice suddenly gaining an echo. "Cauldron?"

"I don't think anyone did," Defiant said. He paused. "This is a long story, a sensitive one. If it gets spread, I will personally hunt you each and every one of you down and kill you."

"Jesus," Imp said. Her voice was brittle. "Could you try being more insensitive, you massive dickhole?"

"Lives ride on this information," he shot back. "Maybe everybody's lives do. Don't act like a bunch of frivolous teenagers."

"Spill," Tattletale said, before Imp could continue picking a fight with the man who controlled the metal box they were flying in.

"Dragon is an artificial intelligence," he said. "She was created by Andrew Richter in Newfoundland before Leviathan destroyed it. He was a paranoid man, afraid of his own daughter, and he hobbled her with restriction after restriction. She only thinks at the speed of a very intelligent human. She can't have more than one consciousness active at a time. She can't make other AI. She has to obey the law. And so on."

"Okay," Tattletale said after she took it in. "I think I'd have questions, but I can't ask. Got the basics. Go on."

"I've been working around her restrictions, but it's slow-going, imperfect, and risky. But things are starting to pay off. I finally broke her of her obligation to obey the law. Otherwise she would have been forced against her nature and inclination to send Skitter to the birdcage."

"But Skitter _was_ Birdcaged," Grue said.

"When the Dragonslayers made their move, they put her in a position where she didn't have conscious control over the AI that handles the Birdcage. It did its job in her absence."

"Sounds like you're making excuses," Bitch said.

"Bitch," Tattletale said. "It's like if you were wounded during a fight and your dogs just started doing what they wanted. They'd do what you told them to do last, or they'd try to act the way you trained them. They'd try to a good job the way you trained them, but it wouldn't be _perfect_. They'd make mistakes."

Bitch was silent.

Defiant took that as a cue to continue. "One possibility is that they _just so happened_ to launch an attack at that time. It was a coincidence, a test-run for something else, or just a way to show her that they can still hurt her. Another is that they are _aware_ I'm modifying Dragon and know that she isn't obligated to obey the government anymore, and they acted to ensure Skitter _did_ go to the Birdcage."

"Do you want to know which one it is?" Tattletale asked.

"Coincidence doesn't exist," Defiant said. "The PRT has already started making noises about wanting to fire Dragon, to take the Birdcage out of her control. I think Saint's trying to show they _should_ do that and that he _can_ take her place."

He shifted. She'd have to ask Brianâ€"or Rachelâ€"about his body language later. When he spoke again, there was a note of emotion in his voice. "We didn't tell anyone what we were going to do with Skitter. _Only_ Dragon and I knew, had any reason or means to know. And yet they knew what we were planning. That means they have a way to see her, to monitor her. There's a backdoor, one I can't find."

"You want me to find it?" Lisa asked. "I'm not sure if I can. Tinkertech isn't as open to me as some things are."

"No," he said. "If they can see her, they'd see you looking for that. They might attack her again. I can't work like that. Your friend is only the first one is going to die so long as they are out there, looking to destroy her for who she is."

Tattletale saw where this was going. She grinned. She couldn't help it, even though he'd just confirmed Taylor's death. She'd help Dragon with this, Dragon would help her with Cauldron.

"I . . . I will give you whatever you want to do this, Tattletale. Find out where the Dragonslayers are hiding. Find Saint."

"Sure," she said. Fuck, even smiling was aggravating her migraine. "I'll do it."


	12. Occupy 1

**Occupy 3.1**

I reeled. It was too much bad news to take in. more than a hundred dead. The PRT teams in LA and, what was it, Houston? had been beheaded. Ad an entire Wards team had been wiped out? Which one? It probably wasn't Brockton Bay's. The word "entire" wasn't really applicable to a team that had already been gutted by Leviathan and other crises—some of which, I had to admit, were _my_ fault. Still, I hadn't _disliked_ Vista or Clockblocker, and they certainly didn't deserve to die fighting against Behemoth.

I should have been there.

It was ridiculous to suppose the Behemoth fight would have been substantially different if I'd been there, but . . . but . . . _but_. I _needed_ to hope Dinah was right, because being stranded on another world and forced to rely on whatever Cauldron felt like giving me _really_ didn't feel like it was worth it.

I _had_ gotten a lot of information, but it all raised more questions instead of answering the ones I already had. Someone was controlling Scion? And it wasn't Cauldron? And they didn't know who it was? How the hell was controlling the most powerful cape in the world _not_ at the top of that priority list? They had all the others—except for the Endbringers, and Tattletale knew they weren't human.

What was it that the Doctor did that was so important? I assumed it had to do with granting people powers, but what did that look like? Was her power something like Bonesaw's? Did it give her an understanding of the passengers—agents—that the rest of us didn't have? And if my theory that they were powering people by going to other dimensions to find passengers was right, how did they get from that other dimension to the canisters I'd seen?

The way they called the power-granting organisms "agents" instead of passengers . . . that was unsettling. Bonesaw had said the passengers weren't _for_ us, that we'd never been meant to have them. So had something changed to make them seek us out anyway? So we could be "used"? _To what end?_

I felt like I was on the verge of figuring something out, that all I needed was one more fact or to look at the pieces I already had in the right way, and that everything would click.

I missed Tattletale. If an Endbringer fight was where I belonged, then Lisa would be in her element here. So many things to learn, so many answers to questions I knew she'd been working on for a long time, so many powerful people to provoke . . .

Speaking of which, how did the Number Man and Contessa fit into all this? She was a precog of some kind and he had an affinity for "numbers," but that didn't seem to fit with what I'd seen. If they were parahumans on the same level as Eidolon, Alexandria, Legend, and Hero, what were their full powers? Alexandria had seemed to think Contessa was capable of stopping a war, and Contessa in turn had indicated the Number Man could achieve a similar effect. And what the hell _could_ she do that took priority over stopping wars, but not, apparently, making Alexandria coffee?

I'd finished housing all my spiders, and I set the temperature of each of the now occupied terrariums at twenty-two degrees Celsius and cranked up the humidity to over seventy percent. Then I used the flies I'd managed to get before Alexandria had shut the portals to assess my surroundings.

The local bug species also gave me some insight into the area. The building I was in was three stories tall—above the surface. I could sense another six floors below ground. The first basement contained what was unquestionably a tinker workshop, while the ones below that were nothing but concrete floors and boxes-lots of boxes. Supplies? If so, what kind and for whom? I'd have to see them for myself.

As for the three main floors, the bottom-most seemed to be a communal living space. Kitchen, dining area, a lounge with couches facing a television. Prominence was sitting at the table and using a laptop. There were others as well, two women sitting on one couch and a man on another. I tagged them with bugs and continued my exploration.

The middle was a dorm, for lack of a better word. The stairwell on that floor opened into a hallway instead of one big room like I had, and there were four rooms on each side, each of which had its own bathroom with shower. I checked the rooms to make sure nobody was in there and backed off. No point in intruding on their privacy before I'd even met them.

The floor I was on was taken up entirely by the room I was standing in as well as a smaller living area through a door on the far end, opposite of the stairwell the tinker had used. I found it was very similar to the quarters I'd left behind in their base, minus the kitchenette. I set my bag with the guns in the closet, where I also found more white tees and black jeans. I wondered what I had to do to get some clothes I _wanted_ to wear, or at least a watch.

The computer indicated it was almost noon. That didn't match with what I could see of the sun's position outside the windows. I guessed that it was probably around three-thirty in the afternoon where I was now. Did all of Cauldron run off of the same time zone regardless of where in the world—worlds—their operatives were? I supposed that made a degree of sense, but it would take some getting used to.

By this point, I wasn't surprised to see that the three text files I'd made earlier that morning were waiting for me in the documents folder. I _was_ surprised to see another folder, labeled Strike Team B26. I passed over that for the time being and opened the one with my questions.

\- _Why do agents bond with humans?_

\- _Who is controlling Scion and how?_

Then I considered what was perhaps the worst piece of news I'd heard. Alexandria had said there would be at least six more Endbringer attacks before the end of the world, and the Doctor had referred to the "intervening" attacks. That suggested the Endbringers would, in fact, _not_ be bringing about the end.

\- _Endbringers are not part of end of world scenario?_

Which raised another set of completely unanswerable questions. Would they intervene, actively help in the destruction of humanity? Would they stick to their cycle, being dormant or attacking as normal regardless of what else was happening? If nearly everybody died, _what_ would they attack? What did Cauldron think they'd do, and did they have plans to counter it?

And why hadn't they started to evacuate Bet once Leviathan had surfaced, once it became clear the Endbringers were here to stay? Why did they have to have armies, and why did those armies have to stay on Bet?

Again, I had the sense that if I changed my perspective the merest fraction, things would suddenly make sense. As it was, I was left thinking that either they were lying through their teeth about everything important, or they were entirely crazy. Admittedly, the Doctor had seemed sane—arrogant, dismissive, close-minded, yes, but sane—but that didn't necessarily prove anything. _Jack_ seemed sane, mostly, when you talked to him, and he actively _wanted_ to end the world.

At least I knew _Alexandria_ was sane. The emotion I'd seen her display a few minutes ago was even something approaching normal. Eidolon was sane, if unremarkable. I hadn't seen enough of either the Number Man or Contessa to tell if they were mentally all there, but they hadn't reminded me of anyone unstable I'd known. They weren't like Sophia or Bonesaw or even Panacea.

So that made it more likely they were lying (about which parts?), or they were mistaken about everything (but if they had _all_ their basic facts wrong, they wouldn't have accumulated so many power, surely?), or the things they were hiding could explain their behavior.

Maybe. Hopefully.

I saved and closed my questions and opened the other folder, the one about the team I'd been assigned. More folders were inside: an overview that contained the history, purpose, and capabilities of the team; past mission logs; how to coordinate resupply and transportation; guidelines on getting team equipment fixed. I clicked through each of these things rapidly, not taking much in. I was interested in finding files on the most important part: the people and their powers.

My computer dinged as an instant message from Prominence came in. _We know you're up there. Come down and introduce yourself._


	13. Occupy 2

**Occupy 3.2**

I thought of Bitch, of how she interpreted commands and status. I decided not to immediately take Prominence up on his invitation, to maybe show I wasn't _shy_ , just _busy_.

 _I'll get my spiders settled,_ I typed _. See you shortly._

I heard him typing through the bugs I had downstairs.

 _Right-ho. Hope you aren't squeamish._

Did he think I _could_ be, with my powers? I assumed he meant some of the people on my team were like Gully or Newter, but that wouldn't bother me. No Case 53 I'd met had come close to being as repulsive or monstrous as Bonesaw or Coil or, well, Alexandria.

More typing.

 _And call yourself Skitter. Nobody else has their real name._

That was exactly the kind of information I'd hoped to gain from reading the files, and I was a little irritated he wasn't giving me time to find things out on my own. I was always apprehensive about social situations anyway, and my reputation hadn't followed me when I'd left Bet. Lung wasn't around, so I couldn't make the same first impression on this group as I had on the Undersiders. I would be on my own.

Never mind. I'd been thrown into worse situations with less preparation.

After a moment's consideration, I put my arm into one of the terrariums I'd just filled and directed a few of its inhabitants to crawl onto me. I directed the remainder to start drawing out lines of silk, just in case. If I needed to deal with one of them the way I'd had to deal with Bitch, I'd have bugs and silk on hand.

Then I walked downstairs.

"There you are," Prominence said. "This is Skitter."

A man about my father's age rose. He had a massive beard streaked with gray and a faint red mist emanated from his skin. "I'm Wrath," he said.

"Teratoma," said the woman on the other couch, waving. Like Weld, she'd completely changed—she still looked human, but her skin had been entirely replaced by a glossy black material. She jerked a thumb at the blonde, freckled girl sitting next to her, who was about my age and who hadn't suffered any obvious change. "This is Mercurial."

Did Mercurial not talk?

"Which bedroom did they put you in?" Teratoma asked.

Prominence had made the connection between the terrariums and my power, and he'd obviously told the others I was here. So why ask the question? I directed a few spiders to crawl down the back of my legs to the floor. "The one on the third floor," I said.

The man with the red mist surrounding him spoke. "What qualifies you to head this team?" he asked.

I looked at him, trying to figure out how to handle the challenge. The third floor was a status symbol, here, an indicator I was the leader. I thought of Rachel again—no, I thought of _Brian_. Wrath reminded me of the man who had criticized me despite the fact I was helping him feed his family and had removed rats from his house. Brian would have known how to handle him, maybe even without hurting his pride. I wouldn't be so lucky.

I'd have to settle for _effective_.

"I know why Teratoma asked the question she did," I said. "Do you?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"She _knew_ I'm on the third floor. All of you do," I said. "But she wanted me to say so. Was it to undermine me by making me explain myself, or irritate you by reminding you that you're not in charge?"

Teratoma's smile widened to the same degree Wrath's face clouded. The cloud was literal as well; the red mist around him thickened from whisps into foggy tendrils, nearly obscuring his face from my view. "I don't think you need much undermining, _child_ ," he said.

"I can see why you'd think that," I said. "Bug control? Not very interesting, on the surface. Especially not if you're thinking _one_ moth or _one_ spider. Tiny, easily overlooked, crushable. Easy to underestimate if you don't think very much."

He stepped forward, or tried to. I'd used spiders to tie his ankles together. His feet caught on the webbing and he fell.

"I _hate_ being underestimated," I went on. "I know you don't know me, and I'd sound like I was delusional or exaggerating if I tried to _tell_ you what I've done. So I'll give you a pass here. Wait until we've had a few assignments, do what I say for the time being, and let me prove myself. If you aren't satisfied with my competence after a real _battle_ , I'll fight you one on one for leadership."

"You'd fight me?" he asked, struggling to untangle himself. I didn't help. "Do you have the first idea of my power is?"

"No," I said. "I don't think it matters. You can't be scarier than the Slaughterhouse Nine or an Endbringer." I looked at the others. "Do you guys follow news on Earth Bet? Enough to know what the Endbringers are?"

Nods and murmurs of assent.

"Prominence always makes us watch Bet news when it's his turn with the remote," Teratoma said. She elbowed her companion in the side. "So does she."

Mercurial spoke for the first time. "You've seen an Endbringer?"

"Leviathan attacked my city," I said. "I followed him with my bugs and shoved a tinkertech halberd up his asshole. Er, where his asshole would have been, if he had one."

"A halberd?" She leaned forward. "Like the one Armsmaster has?"

"It _was_ Armsmaster's," I said, and her eyes went wide. A cape groupie? "He was injured and I came across him, borrowed his weapon." I left out the part where I'd stopped him from bleeding to death; I wasn't sure if she'd believe me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to see her enthusiasm if she _did_.

"What's he like?" she asked.

"He's . . . not what you'd think he is. More arrogant, stubborn. Competent, driven, but not what you'd call _heroic_."

"He stepped down after the last Endbringer attack," she said. "They said he was injured."

"That was the one. He was healed, by the way, stepped down for other reasons. He's calling himself Defiant now, works with Dragon."

A door opening—a portal, not the front door—interrupted the conversation. A blond man in his early twenties stepped through, and he was carrying a couple of bags. Electric blue cracks split his face, and the cracks continued down his neck and disappeared under his shirt. He had similar cracks on his hand, and they ran up his arm, again disappearing under his shirt.

He looked around. "Where are the twins?" he asked.

"We thought they were with you," Teratoma said.

He shook his head. "Are they in their rooms?"

"Nobody's upstairs," I said.

He put his bags on the floor and sped out of the room, inhumanly fast. A mover. He was in front of us one instant and upstairs searching each of the rooms the next. Each time he stopped speeding, he radiated a wave of cold that was harsh enough to kill the bugs within five feet of him.

"Unless they have a breaker or stranger power that would make them undetectable to my bugs' senses?" I asked the room as a whole.

"They're thinkers," Prominence said. "We think they're eleven or so, new enough we haven't named them yet. The boy is good at setting traps and the girl is good with her fists. Blitzeis has taken them under his wing."

"He's done such a good job that he's lost them five times," Teratoma said. "And they only showed up last Tuesday."

I was beginning to dislike her. Setting me and Wrath up to fight in our first conversation, now mocking the mover for losing track of the kids . . . a bully? They'd put me on a team with a bully, an Armsmaster _fan_ , and someone who was grossed out by bugs?

Fuck me, nothing was ever easy.

"Where do they usually go when they disappear?" I asked, directing the question to Prominence and Wrath. I'd need a better grasp of the team's dynamics and her powers before I confronted her.

"Out," Blitzeis said, emerging from the stairs, which he'd walked down at a more normal speed. "They just wandered off the first couple of days. We stopped them and now they _sneak_ off. They were here when I left, which was nearly three hours ago."

"I was asleep," Teratoma said innocently, which made me assume she was guilty of _something_.

"They don't have access to the portals, so at least we're limited to where they can walk," Prominence said. "But his power makes them _very_ good at hiding."

I'd been slowly moving the bugs in my range to the building I was standing in. I canceled the order and started searching.

It didn't take me long to notice two people, both short enough to be children, running through the valley at the edge of my range. One of them was running less fluidly, more slowly than the other. The one in front stopped and returned to tug the other along.

"I take it we're the only humans on this planet?" I asked.

"We are," Wrath said. He'd gotten himself mostly untangled by this point.

"Then I found them," I said. "They're over that way, a little over half a mile, on their way back here."

Then the things they were running from came into range.

"And it looks like they need our help."


	14. Occupy 3

**Occupy 3.3**

I threw up a curtain of bugs between the fleeing children and the seven creatures that followed them. The shape and way they moved didn't match any animals I'd seen before. Large foxes, almost? Coyotes?

"They're being chased by a group of four-legged animals. Like a pack of dogs."

"Dholes," Wrath said. "Dogs are a human creation and wolves haven't evolved here, at least not that I've discovered."

Whatever they were, they still had eyes and noses and ears and throats, and when they started to push through the wall of bugs I'd set up, I attacked those.

"I think you can get there the fastest," I said to Blitzeis. "Can you take a hit from a dhole?"

"I move too fast to be hit," he said—which was a no, I guessed. "Where are they?"

"Follow the arrows," I said. He looked confused, so I formed an arrow of bugs immediately outside the window. "Like that."

He nodded and was gone. I noticed Prominence made a face at the sight the cloud of insects, but I ignored it. He'd learn.

The kids had stopped running and started climbing a tree, with the one who'd had trouble keeping up going first and the other helping. The dhole closest to them abruptly slipped, falling a few feet into a nearby stream. A branch fell from an overhanging tree onto its back, pinning it beneath the water. Too convenient to be a coincidence, so was that the male twin's power at work?

Every time Blitzeis reached an arrow, he changed direction, and the resulting blast of cold destroyed most of the bugs guiding him.

That was going to be a problem. I couldn't directly track him, and he'd eliminate a lot of my situational awareness in close-quarters combat.

Even now, I was thinking of solutions. I could use something like I had with Charlotte and the fly in the box. If I could get my hands on a material that resisted temperature changes, I could enclose flies in small boxes and have him wear one or two when we went out. "What's your specialty?" I asked Prominence.

"I make armor, swords, and tools, mostly. I'm not really limited in _what_ I build, so long as it maintains contact with me," he said. A melee fighter, then, and probably not what I was looking for. "Why?"

The dhole trapped in the creek had drowned. The others were arguably worse off. They were stumbling around and pawing at their heads, trying to dislodge my wasps. I heard their howling through my bugs. As Blitzeis reached the tree, I pulled the wasps off.

 _I'm glad Rachel can't see me now_.

The thought made me realize that what I'd done might have been as horrifying to the kids as having been hunted to begin with. I searched for something less intimidating to guide them back. Would butterflies work?

"Just thinking," I said. "I'll let you know if it goes anywhere."

"Two people under your care are being stalked by predators and you're asking irrelevant questions?" Wrath asked.

"The dholes aren't a problem anymore," I said. "We might have to do something to drive them off later because they're blind now, but they won't be bothering us."

Teratoma looked up. She was channel surfing, apparently in need of something more interesting than two children being attacked. "You blinded them from here?"

"Wasp stings on the eyelids," I said. "They'll survive if they don't accidentally walk of a cliff or anything, but they'll be hurting for a while."

"Interesting," she said. "More direct than my power."

"Your power?" I asked.

"My strikes blind people at first. If I hit someone more than once, they start to hallucinate. Fun interaction with Wrath's mist."

"Which does what, exactly?" I asked.

"What it sounds like," she said. "Makes people angry. Between the two of us, they don't know what's going on, but they're willing to beat each other to death while we walk right by 'em and get whatever we want."

Wrath frowned at her. "It would be more accurate to say that it stimulates adrenaline in others. If the people affected are already inclined to aggression, they become likely to fight. If they are inclined to avoidance, they become more likely to flee. When I generate enough, I can redistribute and shape it to grab and crush things."

I nodded. A shaker power with a master element to it? I'd have to put some thought into planning how to win a fight against him. "Blitzeis is trying to talk the twins out of a tree, by the way," I said. "It sounds like they aren't cooperating. How do you usually get them back?"

"Wait til they get hungry," Teratoma said. "Though that only worked until they realized they could carry food off on their own, which is part of why he's wearing that silly coat in this weather."

 _Ask them if they're hungry_ , I said through my swarm.

Blitzeis jumped half a foot into the air. "Who's there?" he said.

 _It's Skitter. Ask them if they're hungry. I checked their pockets and know they don't have any food left. I think it's getting close to dinnertime, ask them if they want to join us_.

I'd also found something _else_ , something covered with fleas, in the pocket of the one wearing a jacket.

"How do you know they're siblings?" I asked.

The kids started to slide out of the tree.

"We were told that when they were dropped off," Prominence said. "That's all we know. I think that's all _they_ know. English isn't their native language, either, so it's even harder for them."

"Blitzeis just got them out of the tree with the promise of dinner," I said. "We should probably have something ready for them when they get back."

"Blitz's turn to cook," Teratoma said. "That's what should be in the bags."

I investigated and discovered boxes of pasta and cans of sauce as well as a couple of packages of salad in one bag. Easy enough to figure out what his intentions were form that. The other was filled with clothes too small for him. He'd gone shopping on their behalf? How did shopping work here, anyway? Did Cauldron give us funding or did we just "door" ourselves to something we felt like stealing?

I had water boiling in a pot by the Blitzeis returned. He ushered the kids in after him. They were _obviously_ related, both with dark hair and eyes and the same Hispanic features. She was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and her hands looked to have been changed to a white ceramic that reminded me of Mannequin's body. He was wearing jeans and a trench coat, but no shirt. My bugs confirmed that his chest and most of his limbs and joints were of the same material as his sister's hands, which might account for his difficulty running.

"Here they are," Blitzeis said. "No explanation for why they ran off this time."

"Check his inside jacket pocket," I said. I couldn't help smiling.

"What the—oh, god damn it," Blitzeis said, as he fished the object the fleas were congregating on out of the trench coat. "They went out to get a puppy."

And they had. Granted it looked like a tiny fox and not really a _puppy_ , but what they'd done to attract the dholes' attention was now clear. They'd raided a den and bitten off more than they could chew.

I hoped we had milk.

"Throw it out," Wrath said. "It's mangy and filthy and covered in bugs."

"Fleas aren't a problem with me around," I said, removing them from the puppy as I spoke. I had to resist the temptation to plant them in Wrath's beard. "And you said it yourself. Dogs are a human creation. That started somewhere. I think—"

A voice caught my attention, startling me and pulling me back to the moments I'd killed Tagg. _Alexandria's_ voice. Coming from the television?

Teraroma had settled on a channel that showed a talkshow from Bet. Alexandria was apparently giving an interview. She was dressed in a new costume and collected and assured as she seemingly ever was. How many minutes had passed since I'd seen her throwing things in the Number Man's office? Thirty? Forty?

"Today was my fiftieth Endbringer fight, Koffi," she was saying. "I haven't ever seen the turnout, the degree of cooperation, or comradery I witnessed today. The allegations of incompetence or mismanagement on the defending forces' part are just so much Monday-morning quarterbacking."

Something in my face or body language must have shown, something that enabled Mercurial to make a connection.

"You're _that_ Skitter," she said slowly. "The crazy one who thought she could kill Alexandria."


	15. Occupy 4

**Occupy 3.4**

I'd been wrong, then, when I'd thought my reputation from Bet hadn't followed me here. It just wasn't the one I _wanted_.

"I _can_ kill Alexandria," I said evenly. "So can anyone with the power to block her airway."

"She's a _hero_ ," Mercurial said. "Why would you want to do that?"

"She baited me into attacking her," I said. "It was a plan to make the Protectorate look good and get me out of the way so I could come here."

"You _are_ crazy," she said. It was almost reverent. "Nobody in the Protectorate would care about us. And Alexandria wouldn't do—"

"In addition to being Director Costa-Brown, ex-head of the PRT, Alexandria is also part of Cauldron," I said, a little more harshly than I probably needed to. "They thought I would be of use to them, and so I'm here."

"That doesn't make any sense. Cauldron . . . _We're_ Cauldron operatives. The Protectorate doesn't do things like that." She looked at her hands. Was there something wrong with her I couldn't see?

"The _Protectorate_ doesn't," I agreed. "Certain people in the Protectorate, Alexandria among them, certainly did and do. How closely do you follow Bet's cape news? Enough to remember when Myrddin died?" I asked. When she nodded, I went on. "I was there for that fight. Alexandria admitted she was working with Cauldron and that she was secretly running the PRT the entire time. Eidolon was in on it, too. That's the real reason they resigned."

I decided not to mention how the Nemesis Project, which featured the same memory wipe I was pretty sure they'd been subjected to, or the human experimentation—or Legend's peripheral complicity. "They were trying to reform when I left," I said. "Chevalier's the real thing. That's actually part of why I turned myself in. I wanted to set an example. Alexandria coopted that."

" _Why?_ "

I sighed. "The PRT and Protectorate started to fall apart when Alexandria and Eidolon left. I was a prominent supervillain, and Alexandria thought putting me away helped make the Protectorate look like it's more in control of things than it really is. Do you think it's working?"

"I guess it does seem like they took out a big threat," she said. "They made you sound unstable and vicious."

"I _am_ vicious," I said. "Sometimes. When I have to be. That's how I win. I don't think I'm unstable."

"Right," Prominence said. "We can't have you bearing the name that Cauldron's dragged through the mud. You need to come up with something that's not Skitter. Arachne?"

"Wasn't Arachne given spider form as a _punishment_ for offending someone in power?" I asked. "I've never really gotten along well with anyone in authority."

"Myriad?" he suggested. "Legion? Swarm? Hivemind?"

" _No_ ," I said. "I'm not a demon."

"Monarch?" Mercurial offered. "Queen? Weaver?"

"I'm not a queen," I said. The idea combined with the "hivemind" suggestion to remind me of what Bonesaw had proposed to do with me, and I wasn't happy at the thought. "Weaver might work."

A portal opened behind the couch and Contessa stepped through. She was steering a teenager in a gray bodysuit by the elbow. His brown hair was all the same short length, like his head had been shaved in the past week, and his eyes were dull.

Most of the members of my team suddenly became occupied with looking everywhere else. The only one who seemed willing to acknowledge her presence was Prominence, and he was glaring at her over the top of his laptop with undisguised hatred. She didn't seem to notice, and I was pretty certain she didn't care; if the world's quintessential flying brute screaming at her hadn't fazed her, Prominence's silent disapproval certainly wouldn't.

"What is it?" I asked.

"This is Reset," she said. "He can return anything he sees to the state it was up to three seconds prior. Non-Manton limited. The implications for defense are obvious."

Nobody seemed to have a response to the announcement. Wrath, I realized, probably _couldn't_ approach a new and possibly nervous person because of his power. Teratoma and Mercurial _wouldn't_ , because of who they appeared to be. Blitzeis was pretending to be as interested in the puppy as the twins were, and Prominence wasn't budging.

It fell to me. I took his hand and separated him from Contessa. He lurched.

"Is he okay?" I asked.

"He is disoriented," she said. "They know how to handle it."

She left.

"I _crave_ access to their portal engine," Prominence said.

I looked at him. "Do I want to know why, considering the context?"

"I would modify it so the stench of brimstone accompanies her."

"Just her? Why not the Doctor?" I asked.

"The Doctor is act one Mephistopheles, all promises and 'sign here, please.' _She_ is from act five."

My bugs detected another portal opening in my room.

Contessa had returned. She was holding a bag of some sort now.

"I have to use the bathroom," I said. "Can you take over making the pasta?"

Reset looked at me blankly for a moment. I wondered if I'd made the wrong call, if the memory erasure he'd presumably recently endured had taken too much out of him. Then he nodded.

I found Contessa watching the spiders in the terrarium where I was starting the bare bones of my costume.

"I've seen some of your work before," she remarked when I came in. "In that I cleared Alexandria's lungs."

"How does being a precog qualify you to do that?" I asked.

"I think we'll commission you to make undershirts for our more vulnerable capes later on," she said, acting as though she hadn't registered my question. Then she indicated the duffel bag she'd set on the floor. "The Number Man sends his apologies for having to delay your collection tour. He wanted me to give you this in the meantime. More weapons, medical supplies, other things he thinks you'll find useful. I added a battery of vaccinations for your dog."

"It's not a dog," I said. "But thank you. And . . . thank you for saving Tattletale."

"The boy I just added to your team was the assassin," she said.

 _What?_ "You want me to take care of the guy who wanted to kill my friend?"

"The Doctor won't let me kill him," she said, as though that were the only possible alternative to saddling _me_ with him. "His power saved half the Yàngbǎn today and they wish to retain access to it. At the same time, I can't let him stay in our main facility because of his exposure to the Simurgh. You've worked with the Travelers before."

"I tried to," I said. "They weren't always the most cooperative."

"Reset will be," she said. "He will obey you and he has been primed to bond with your team."

"That's fucked up," I said.

Her expression didn't so much as flicker. _Alexandria_ had more tells than she did. "The process is imperfect," she said. "I can't guarantee the mindwipe eliminated all traces of the Simurgh's influence. You will have to monitor him."

"Not really what I meant."

"If you wish to make the boy's happiness your concern, know that Accord's instincts were right. He only ever wanted to belong to a group, but he wasn't clever or personable enough to be accepted."

"Still fucked up," I said.

"It's the best I can do," she replied as she turned away.

I didn't stay to watch her leave. The bathroom excuse was likely wearing thin, and I needed to get back to my team.


	16. Occupy 5

**Occupy 3.5**

I wasn't able to sleep after dinner had ended and most of the others had gone to bed, so I used the time to sort through the equipment Contessa had dropped off and do some reading.

In addition to a kit of syringes I assumed was for the dhole (and how had she known about that?), I found a baton, a few knives, several canisters of bear mace, an assortment of epipens, and a field first aid kit. I stored these in my closet and booted up my laptop.

As I was waiting for things to load, I rotated the spiders I was using to weave and fed the ones that had just finished. I figured it would take three or four weeks to make a new costume to the standard I wanted—less time if I could get more spiders, more if I needed to regularly leave my base.

I finally pinpointed the files on my team and checked Mercurial first, since she was the only one whose power I didn't have a sense of. It turned out she was a fairly versatile changer. The formula she'd taken had changed her body completely: she might look more normal than the average "deviant case," but her body was now composed of millions of tiny, interlocking cubes. She could reconfigure these into whatever shape she wanted and they'd take on the properties of surfaces they touched, which made her effective at getting into and out of different places as well as camouflage. The only drawback, it seemed, was that she didn't always have voluntary control over the changes.

The rest of the files were more of the same: I was bombarded with what I could only describe as technical notes. Everything on them was about their powers, and I couldn't find any records on how they worked together, their personalities, or their personal histories. There was _one_ note that Wrath's formula had affected his emotions "in a manner consistent with subjects 841, 842, and 843," but the links to the files on the other "subjects" were broken.

I noticed that there were also records of previous team members, which led me to the realization that the mortality rate for the strike team were disturbingly high. Four members of the team, including the previous leader, had died over the past six months. Reading _that_ made me remember to check to see if the twins were still in place. One, the boy, was awake. He was running his fingers over the dhole pup, which in turn was sleeping on his sister's stomach. They hadn't spoken a word since they'd returned, not even when Blitzeis had shown them how to heat milk for their charge.

The files referred to them as "3276" and "3277."

I resolved to make naming them a priority. Real names, not cape names.

I checked on the others. The only one who was still awake was Prominence, who was in his basement workshop. I congregated a small swarm behind him.

"Mind if I come down?" I asked.

To his credit, he didn't scream or jump when I spoke. "I'd rather have you here than flies talking to me," he said. Which wasn't exactly a yes, but I took it as permission anyway.

He was working on a set of boots when I arrived. I found a stool and sat on it.

"I take it you want to talk Cauldron?" he asked.

"I admit I'm struggling to see how setting up amnesiac children to be hunted by wild dogs is necessary for saving the world. Or humanity, since they don't seem to be attached to any particular earth."

"Don't let Wrath hear you call them dogs," he said. "He cares about that. We think he was a biologist or something similar in his previous life. He's got an interest in animals, and he has an instinct for the subject that makes us think he's picking up old skills."

"What did you do? Before you came here?"

" _Ha_ ," he said. It bore no resemblance to an actual laugh.

I wasn't interested in dropping the conversation entirely, but his response was enough to make me switch tacks. "Something made you ask for powers," I said. "What was it?"

"I told you earlier, girl-who-thinks-she-can-save-the-world. I wanted to make a difference, be a hero."

"So did I," I said. "It obviously didn't work out. That thing with Leviathan? I did it to save some people in an Endbringer shelter. The only unambiguously heroic thing I've done, and nobody except Leviathan really noticed. I almost died and those injuries got me in an awful lot of trouble."

"You got further than I did," he said. "I agreed to do some favors in exchange for a discount on the vial. One day early on I got a message asking me to do one of these favors. I thought it must have been a mistake. They'd done a lot of psychological testing and should have known I wouldn't do what they were asking. I ignored it.

"A few days later, they asked me _again_. I refused more directly. Then they said I had a choice. Come here or be set up to lose to one of their other clients." He stared sadly at his boots. "Should have just done what they wanted to begin with."

"You're stuck here indefinitely?" I asked.

"I owe them the cost of the vial without the discount I received for the promise to do favors, plus twenty-seven percent interest. They also stipulated that I pay—in labor—for all the material I use during the time it takes me to work off that debt. They had a folder with all the maths and it worked out to a little over eight and a half years."

I digested that. "That's . . ."

"Excessive?" he offered. "Completely mad?"

"Incongruous," I said. "I don't get the sense they care about money. At all. I don't think they _have_ to, considering they have a thinker whose power is literally accounting."

The bitterness I'd seen in him before was back in full force. "Could have fooled me."

"Your power," I said. Tinkers were easy targets provided you could get at them without their gear. But if he was stashed on another world in between fights, he'd never be caught off guard. "So long as you have access to materials and the time to keep your gear maintained, it's unlikely you're going to die, even going up against some fairly substantial enemies."

"I suppose."

"You've been here since 2007? Was the team new then?"

"It was," he said. He'd abandoned his boots, and had turned, giving me his full attention. "Where are you going with this?"

"What if they just wanted _you_?" I asked. "They asked you to do something they knew you wouldn't, gave you an alternative to coming here they knew you wouldn't accept, and now they have you."

" _Why?_ "

"I'd have to get a sense of their other strike teams," I said. "See if there's a pattern or not."

"What are you thinking?"

"You're sturdy, durable, you have your memories, you aren't _broken_ the way the rest are. You hate _Cauldron_ , so maybe you're a little more inclined to take care of their victims. The team has a foundation. Not a leader, but a consistent element, someone to look out for the others. Eight years is long enough to find someone to replace you with. Or the world ends and it doesn't matter."

His forehead crinkled—in annoyance, not confusion. "That's byzantine and irrational," he said.

"Maybe," I admitted. "I could be completely off the mark. I'm really just trying to make their behavior make sense. If I can understand their motivations when it comes to stuff like this, maybe I can get a better idea of the information they're hiding from me."

He shrugged. "If they don't want money, what about power?"

"I would have said so until this morning," I said. It's the excuse the Eidolon clone had used, but that probably wasn't the whole story, there. "But they _have_ power. The power to make parahumans, the power to control a _lot_ from behind the scenes. Name a powerful individual—except Scion, who's apparently taking marching orders from someone else—and they've got strings attached to them. Alexandria, Eidolon, Legend, and Hero are all theirs. _The_ brute, _the_ trump, _the_ blaster, _the_ tinker."

I could go on down the list, too. Thinker? The Doctor, the Number Man, and Contessa probably all had power ratings in the neighborhood as Eidolon and Legend. Master? The Siberian was inviolable, and whoever did their brainwashing was head and shoulders above Heartbreaker and Cherish. Shaker? The cape behind the doors had _Scion_ beat. He didn't leave Bet. Breaker? There was the Custodian, though her power came with an obvious drawback.

Speaking of drawbacks, how many people had to die to produce parahumans of that caliber? If three in five died, like Newter had said, and they only numbered the survivors . . . did that mean there were more than five thousand "subjects" who _hadn't_ made it? And if the four most powerful heroes in the world had Cauldron to thank for their powers, why hadn't they made more since the 1980s? Alexandria had admitted there were a few "mysteries" they were still "desperately seeking to unravel." Was trying to once again produce people like the Triumvirate one of them?

"What do you think now?"

"Now I'm wondering if they actually are trying to save us all," I said. "And I'm thinking they might be getting desperate."

And if people that powerful were so desperate, what the _fuck_ were they anticipating a fight against?


	17. Occupy X

**Occupy 3.x**

Accord had been looking forward to resting, but the gateway he found in his bedroom had been located such that he couldn't see half of the room and the way to his bed was blocked. The invitation was clear.

So was his inability to refuse.

However exhausted he might be, he would have to meet with them now. He took his mask off and set it in its place, a velvet-covered stand atop his dresser, and stepped into the white hallway. He didn't find Cauldron's chosen aesthetic _pleasant_ , but it was professional and uniform enough that it didn't offend his sensibilities, either. Today, he found the monotony almost soothing.

The Number Man opened the conference room door a second or two before he reached it. "Welcome," he said. "The Doctor and Alexandria have a proposal for you."

As he looked around the room, Accord noticed that Contessa was there as well, seated at the Doctor's right hand and across from Alexandria. She'd placed a fedora on the desk in front of her, which only exacerbated the irritation her affectation of masculine clothing caused him. He took care to sit at a slight angle so that she wasn't in his direct line of sight; he couldn't change or kill her and she was otherwise unobjectionable, so he needed to ignore her.

"Accord," the Doctor said. "I was pleased to hear of your survival."

"I assume you want to discuss payment," he said.

There was a brief silence, which was unusual when he spoke with her. It was almost awkward. Hesitation? He _tried_ not to let the incivility implied in the silence get to him.

"Ordinarily, yes," replied the Doctor at last. "I would. In this case, however, the situation is too grave for me to take _credit_ for what was essentially an accident."

He allowed his skepticism to register on his face. "It seemed to be a very clear, deliberate intervention on your part. Even Chevalier noticed, and he was busy running a battle. _Tattletale_ certainly noticed."

"She did. In fact, the Undersiders' first action once Tattletale recovers the use of her power will be to corner and needle you with the intent to gain information about us." The Doctor paused, giving him time to imagine just how grating that conversation would be. "That is why we asked you in now, even though you're understandably tired and organization's internal affairs need tending. I thought it best to give you fair warning that you have limited time to make a difficult decision."

"Please explain," he said.

"We recruited Skitter to work for us more directly, and we agreed to afford a measure of protection to her old teammates in exchange for her cooperation."

"You were shielding Tattletale, then," he said. "I should be dead."

"Precisely. Given the other consequences the Travelers' migration had on our efforts, it seems clear that the Simurgh intended for you to die in order to round out her assault on us."

"Other consequences?" he asked.

"You've already learned of some of them," the Doctor said. "Alexandria and Eidolon leaving the Protectorate and Legend resigning his position are public knowledge. Considering you were focused on recovering from the attack by the Slaughterhouse Nine, we didn't burden you with the other details. In sum, Alexandria's civilian self was identified as the head of the PRT, the Triumvirate and the Number Man were identified as Cauldron affiliates, and some details on our experimentation were leaked. We've ceded control of the PRT and Protectorate, the Nemesis Project is effectively over, and you . . . are a dead man walking."

Accord was rattled despite himself. He'd had enough shocks today-the attempted assassination, his surprise at Cauldron's intervention, the deaths of three of his Ambassadors, the horrified realization about what Behemoth was planning, and the scramble to save everyone had worn him down. That the Simurgh had struck at _him_ and that her plan had been very nearly effected after more than two years was sobering and frightening. He didn't believe in luck-the concept was offensive to him on nearly every level-but that was what it was: he'd gotten _lucky_.

"We would like you to leave Earth Bet as a security measure and continue work on the master plan from here," the Doctor said. When he didn't immediately reply, she went on. "We won't force you. You are independent and it is very possible that, having failed to kill you once, she won't try again. If she does try again, she may even run out of time, since we know she cannot plan around Scion. We do, however, think it would be exceedingly unwise to decline."

"You want me to abandon the Ambassadors and all my holdings," he said.

"I want you to remain alive for the next two years. Leaving Bet and, yes, ceding Citrine and Lizardtail to the Undersiders would be the price."

"A price _I_ pay," he said. " _You_ lose nothing if I come here."

"We stand to lose _you_ if you do not," she said. "I think we can amply compensate you for the loss. There's nothing preventing you from creating a _new_ group from here, drawn from other worlds. We would of course continue to provide heavily subsidized vials for those of your subordinates you deemed worthy." She swept a hand, the gesture encompassing not the room but the kilometers of empty offices surrounding them. "They can form the nexus of the staff necessary to run all this."

The Number Man spoke up. "I remember you moved to Brockton Bay in part because of the opportunities represented by the portal. Alexandria is going to oversee the opening of another one or two worlds, with more than one portal apiece. I believe there will be scope for your ambitions there."

The other man was right, Accord reflected. "The plan didn't call for moving people to other earths until Scion struck," he said. "Why the change?"

"Delhi," Alexandria said. "We need capes in order to fight Scion. Either we ascertain how to _win_ against Endbringers, or we take one of two other courses of action. The first is to start removing the people they were hoping to target."

"And the second?" he asked, nettled that she should have left him hanging.

"I was thinking of resurrecting an aborted side-project of yours. I understand you were hoping to use some of Blasto's creations."

"Yes," Accord said. "I was hiring him to perform a service that is no longer needed. I also had hopes that he could produce something worth using for _our_ plans." It was part of why he had allowed the samples of Endbringer tissue to fall into the tinker's hands; the other part, of course, had been to see him arrested or killed by the Protectorate. "It came to nothing, thanks to the Nine. I assume he's long since dead."

"On the contrary," the Doctor said, "Bonesaw needed him alive to help establish Jack's cloning project."

"You're planning on removing him?" Accord asked. "I assumed you would want to leave the Slaughterhouse Nine alone to ensure Jack encounters Scion at the earliest possible time. Is there a way to get to him without disrupting Jack's plan?"

"Not without complicating things," Contessa said, and the sentence fragment grated on him. "Bonesaw will leave the pocket dimension at the end of September, which was when I was planning on engaging her, but she won't take Blasto with her. That means we would have to go to her directly, and she would defend herself against any intrusion from an unknown element."

"What if she knew the intruder?" the Doctor asked.

"Perhaps. Bonesaw is missing her 'family' and would be receptive to meeting a lost uncle." She looked at the Number Man. "I give you a script, Doormaker breaches their dimension, and you walk out with Blasto."

The Number Man grimaced. "I could be Harbinger again if you think it's necessary."

"It would work," Contessa said, and looked to the Doctor.

"I think you should consider the possible ramifications of using Blasto to produce capes and creatures with which to fight the Endbringers," Accord said. "His workshop would inevitably become an Endbringer target, or the Simurgh would find something more indirect."

"You raise good points," the Doctor agreed. "Contessa says that Blasto will survive for another three months, so we don't have to decide immediately."

Alexandria spoke. "We _do_ need to decide soon. If we're going to clone, then we should give the clones time to gain experience with their powers. If we're going to encourage Blasto to experiment with Endbringer tissues, then we should give him more time rather than less if we wish him to produce anything useful." She smiled a little wryly. "I also feel compelled to mention that another three months of being tortured by Bonesaw will do no wonders for his health or ability to focus."

"Acknowledged," the Doctor said. "That said, our guest is tired and Blasto's fate is not what we asked him here to discuss. What are you thinking, Accord? Do the terms seem fair, even taking your losses into account?"

"Yes," he said. "I would require a revised contract and time to set my affairs in order."

"Of course. Tattletale will be looking to call on you five days from now. Would you be ready to take up residence in ninety-six hours?"

Accord nodded, knowing full well that his acquiescence had been a foregone conclusion.


	18. Demonstration 1

**Demonstration 4.1**

There was a shoe on my chest when I woke up—specifically my left shoe, with a pale yellow sticky note attached to the toe. The light streaming in through the windows illuminated a ball of gray and red fuzz nestled in the heel. I reached for my glasses, peeled the note off, and squinted at the florid script.

 _Breakfast at 0830. - Blitzeis_

A second, more cramped sentence followed.

 _They saw me leave the note and wanted to leave you something too. - B._

That explained the puppy's presence, sort of. I didn't want to wake it up, so I left it in the shoe. Its eyes were still closed, which I thought meant it was far too young to be separated from its mother. I wondered what Rachel would say if she saw a dog that had been taken like that, and I felt a little guilty. If I'd been in an established city on Bet and not dealing with two traumatized children who didn't so much as know their names, I might have put my foot down as well.

I checked my watch, which told me I had about forty minutes, and headed to the shower. I directed my bugs to move through the building, checking on the others. Prominence was back in, or perhaps _still_ in, his workshop, shirtless and listening to some tinny old-fashioned jazz. Wrath was nowhere to be found. Blitzeis and the twins were outside, walking along the crest of one of the surrounding hills.

Reset had eaten and gone to bed without saying a word. Now he was sitting at the table with Mercurial, his head in his hands.

"I don't remember anything," he was saying. "I don't even know what my name is. Is this a hospital?"

"It's not a hospital," Teratoma said. As best as I could tell, she wasn't facing him, but focused on something on the stove. "It's our house. You aren't sick."

"There's something wrong with me. I think I need to go to a hospital," he said. "No, I can't. Can't. We can't go to a hospital. They'll . . . catch us."

"A hospital won't help you help you," she said. "You lost your memory because of a superpower, not because something's wrong with your head."

Reset was still talking, mostly to himself from the sound of it. "Why . . . Why am I scared to go to a hospital? _Who's_ going to catch me?"

"Maybe you came here from a hospital," Mercurial suggested. "You were dying and that made you scared of the place you were in."

"No," he said. "No. There's nothing wrong with me. Not my body. It's my _head_."

"Sometimes powers heal people," Mercurial continued. "When they gave you powers, it made you better, but a part of you still remembers how scared you were."

"You don't understand," Reset said. "I _can't remember_."

"We _do_ understand," Teratoma said. "I can't remember, either. Mercurial can't remember. Wrath can't remember. Blitzeis can't remember. The twins can't remember. Em, get me a plate."

There was silence for a few moments during which Mercurial did as she'd been asked.

" _Why?_ " Reset asked.

Teratoma started piling something onto the plate Mercurial provided. "They give us powers but they take away everything else. We don't know why, but we can't undo it. Dwelling on it won't do any good."

"If you're here long enough, you'll get some ideas," Mercurial said. "You'll find things you like, things you're good at, skills and preferences you that what you do here can't account for. You just have to give it time."

I had no idea how to handle this. I'd killed Coil for what he'd done to Dinah, and this didn't strike me as all that different just because Cauldron used memory wipes instead of opiates to keep their abductees compliant. I wasn't as _offended_ on a fundamental level by what was going on here, but then I hadn't been complicit in any of it.

"Tera can speak and read Japanese and Korean and she couldn't read English at first, so we think she must be from one of those countries. We can guess that Blitzeis and Wrath knew each other from before. They came together, they both speak German, and Blitz doesn't like Wrath but doesn't know why."

"Nobody likes Wrath," Teratoma said. "Which is just as well, because _Wrath_ likes Wrath more than enough for everyone else."

"It's different with Blitz," Mercurial said.

"And what about the other two?" Reset asked.

"Prominence and Skitter—Weaver—are from Bet. They're natural triggers. Prominence was in a war and Skitter was bullied really badly. We think maybe getting powers the wrong way is what erases our memories."

I paused as I was toweling off. Prominence had lied to them about having a trigger event?

 _Of course_ he had lied to them, out of shame or fear of how they'd respond. It seemed unlikely that Cauldron told their clients up front that they used human experimentation to refine their product. If he had any sense of morality at all, he would have been _appalled_ to discover the truth. I wondered how severely I'd react in his shoes. I'd had difficulty enough realizing that I'd unknowingly assisted in the kidnapping and enslavement of _one_ girl, and Cauldron had done it on a scale of _thousands_.

And now that I was here, witnessing the less savory side of Cauldron's plans firsthand, what would _I_ do? What _could_ I do, that wouldn't cause more harm?

I finished dressing and removed the dhole from my shoe, which woke it up. It started nibbling at my fingers. Unsure how to deal with it, I put it down on my desk and picked up one of the smartphones Contessa had dropped off the day prior. I started to explore the phone with one hand while I did up my shoes with the other.

The phone's operating system had the same black and white interface as the computers' did. It didn't get any service—and I hadn't expected it to—but it did connect to the base's wireless. I had internet, albeit not Aleph or Bet's internet, I had access to my computer's files, and I could run Cauldron's internal messaging program.

I put the phone in my pocket and collected the dhole and reached the first floor just as Blitzeis returned with the twins. "Go wash your hands," he told them. "Yes, _both_ of you."

They reluctantly trudged off.

I held out the dhole to him. "Can you deal with this? I don't want to do anything wrong."

"You haven't fed it, have you?" he asked.

"I'm not sure how," I said. "And if they wanted it badly enough they'd risk dying to get it, I think _they_ should be responsible for feeding it."

"Agreed," he said. "I'll need to get some bottles and milk for it today."

"I'll go," Mercurial said. She was still standing next to Teratoma, watching her pile a plate high with pancakes. "With Reset. He has to get some proper clothes anyway."

Reset hadn't said anything yet, so I caught his eye. "Did you sleep all right?" I asked.

"Yeah." He paused. "I don't know who I am."

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry. I wish I knew more about you."

All three statements were true. I couldn't be sure whether telling them everything I knew would help, but I wouldn't _lie_. Until I came to a decision about what I'd do about the memory wiping, I could at least make sure I wouldn't add to the wrong. And if and when I needed to talk about what I knew of the experimentation, I wouldn't have to backtrack.

My phone vibrated before Reset could reply.

I pulled it out of my pocket to see that an unsigned message with an attachment had come through.

 _Surveillance mission. Door opens 1047._


	19. Demonstration 2

**Demonstration 4.2**

"Heads up," I said, downloading the attachment. "We've got somewhere to go in a couple of hours."

Blitzeis frowned. "That was fast. We haven't had a job in nearly a month. You arrive, they fill our last spot, and then we're off." He gave me a sidelong glance. "We'll do what you say, but I'm not sure the twins are ready, and Reset is going to need time to adjust as well."

"I agree," I said. "We'll see what's needed and plan from there."

The attachment was just a longer text note with a picture at the end. I read it aloud. "War, Earth 706," I began. "There are seven hundred six earths out there?"

"More than that," Blitzeis said. "We're on one thousand fifty-four."

And they were all going to end? My mind simply refused to process that. What could unleash that scale of destruction? If it started on Bet, that meant that it was presumably a power. A passenger getting loose, akin to what had happened with Echidna? An Endbringer refusing to retreat, or perhaps more Endbringers? But then what did Jack have to do with it?

I bent my head back over my phone. "Stalemate four years, in past two months aggressor displayed abrupt disproportionate technological advantage over enemy. Observe target, determine whether/degree parahuman involvement, report every eight hours until directed to stop."

"Translation," Teratoma said. "There's a war on and one side is smarter and nastier than it should be. Stare at it until you figure out why."

"It sounds like they suspect tinker intervention," I said.

"It's unlikely," Prominence said from behind me. "Tinkers generally can't mass produce anything. Making a very select few items for teammates is about as far as we go. A lot of us are like me and can't even go that far. Assuming my source on that wasn't lying—and in retrospect, that is a pretty big assumption to grant—you've got a garden-variety arms race winner on your hands."

"Hope so," Blitzeis said. "Surveillance that doesn't go anywhere is safe."

"Of course," Teratoma said, "you do realize that if it _is_ a tinker, Cauldron will want the man for themselves. Then we've got a raid on our hands."

Blitzeis looked unhappy at the prospect.

"Did you say that for any reason other than to upset Blitzeis?" I asked. "I appreciate any insight into how missions work, but it sounds like you just wanted to needle him."

Teratoma shrugged. "It's cute, how he worries about the kids." She finished filling the plate and let Mercurial take it off to the table. "It makes him an easy target."

"That's possibly the worst excuse you could have given, just then," I said. "Teammates require the space to expose their vulnerabilities without being set on by the rest of the group. Without that, there's no trust, and without trust, there's no team."

Teratoma shrugged again. I suspected that this would not be the first time I'd have to set that boundary, but she was content to be silent for now.

Prominence intercepted Mercurial and helped himself to a few pancakes, earning himself glares from everyone else except Reset. "I need to speak with you in private, fearless leader," he said.

"I'm not fearless," I said. "Fearlessness is a good way to get killed and an even better indication that something is wrong with you."

"Gloomy way of looking at things," he said, already turning to go. "Come to my lair after breakfast?"

"Sure," I said.

The conversation turned to adding Reset and me into the chores schedule. If I had to guess, they were all avoiding the topic of the mission as much as they'd avoided acknowledging Contessa's presence the previous day. Was their unwillingness to directly address anything associated with Cauldron for more than they had to a side-effect of the brainwashing? I remained silent outside of agreeing to do the assigned chores and cook every seventh day and just listened to them, trying to get a better grasp on how they interacted.

I later found Prominence sitting on his workbench, once again shirtless. All four pancakes he'd taken were sitting next to some of his tools, cold and forgotten. When he turned, I saw the hard surface that I'd noticed with my bugs yesterday was an armored shell that covered most of his chest. A second plate extended from the bottom of his ribcage down toward his navel. Both pieces of the armor were ornately decorated—not in texture, which was universally smooth as my bugs had indicated, but in terms of color. He'd blended what looked like LED lights and different metals in a spiraling fractal pattern.

"I hope this doesn't shock you," he said. "When I took the vial, I deviated a little. They told me it always happened with that particular sample and that whatever part of me that was affected would need technological enhancement. My particular deviation mirrored some old wounds, and now I have to spend a couple hours every day making sure my lungs and liver work."

I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't about Mannequin, so I just waited for him to get to the point. There was a reason he'd asked me down here.

"I've been thinking about what you said last night. It makes a kind of sense. Did you read their file on me?"

I shook my head. "I don't have accesses to it if there is one. The ones I have on the others were focused more on the results of their 'testing,' not on team dynamics or power interactions."

He put his shirt back on. "I was in the military. Tangentially involved in unconventional warfare. I stumbled across something I shouldn't have, something I thought was wrong."

"What was it?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter. I blew the whistle and my chain of command seemed to take it seriously. The next thing I knew, I was assigned to a patrol that was blown up. I was severely wounded and three other people died in the blast. I don't have _proof_ that my commander deliberately leaked the patrol route to the enemy in an effort to silence me, but I don't think I need it. Do you follow?"

I nodded.

"I didn't fight the medical discharge and I moldered for a bit. I concluded that you're either privileged enough the system will bend itself to accommodate you, or you're a victim of that same corrupt and failed system."

I found myself nodding again. I could understand that feeling completely, even if I didn't have the specifics of his situation.

"I thought I found a loophole. Parahumans as individuals _do_ have power to effect meaningful change. I wanted that power for myself, to see if I couldn't do a little bit of good in this world and _make_ things be the way they should be. Somewhere along the line I attracted _their_ attention, and I got a little note in my flat that set up the initial meeting. They explained that they could give me what I wanted, could even guarantee me a tinker power. I agreed immediately, didn't ask the questions I should have, and sold everything I had to cover the cost of the vial. You know how that ended."

"Yeah," I said.

"I thought I'd gotten in over my head, had just been stupid enough to sign another contract with a powerful system, but I thought I'd see things through for their sake—the ones like Blitzeis and Mercurial, the kids who didn't ask for this but got fucked anyway." His mouth hardened. "But now I know that's exactly what they planned, and I'll be damned before I lift another blighted finger for them. That cross-dressing bitch can come kill me if she wants, but I quit."

"Okay," I said. He looked surprised. Had he really think I would fight him on this? I would have to talk him down simply because I doubted Cauldron would look favorably on my requests for more information if I couldn't even keep my own team in line, but I wasn't about to contradict anyone on a moral issue. "Do what you have to. But in the meantime, I need to keep these people alive, and you're the one who can give me the most insight into how I can do that."

"I think you're more likely to save the world than keep these people in one piece. There's a pretty high casualty rate around here."

"I saw the files," I said. "Four people down in the past six months? That's not something I'm willing to accept. I've never lost anybody and I won't start with children or people who might as well be children."

He shook his head. "It would be a mistake to infantilize them. They can act childish, especially at first, and they don't always understand why they act the way they do, but it doesn't follow that they _are_ children. They don't remember their old selves, but that doesn't mean those older selves are _gone_. They still have subconscious behaviors, habits, and attitudes informing how they act."

"I've had difficult teammates before. I'll figure out how to approach them in a way that works, _if_ I can keep them alive long enough to get to know them." Privately, I resolved that if he withheld any information that could help me, Contessa would be the least of his worries.

"They've already got their hooks in you that deeply, have they? In that case, I suggest you take Mercurial to do the bulk of the surveillance. She doesn't need to sleep and she's virtually undetectable. Teratoma will go if Mercurial does, and you should take Wrath for translation support and firepower. That leaves Blitzeis here to take care of the new ones."

It was sound advice, I thought, at least for the initial shift—though it meant I'd have to hope Wrath would show up in time to go on the mission. "One other thing," I said. I took out my phone and showed Prominence the other half of the attachment, the picture. It was a black and white photograph of a building surrounded by guard towers and a high fence topped with barbed wire. Two words in a language I didn't know were in white text at the bottom. "What do you think of this?"

"I think you don't read German," he said. "What you're looking at is a chemical weapons factory."


	20. Demonstration 3

**Demonstration 4.3**

 _That_ changed things.

"If there _is_ a tinker behind it, then he might have something in the vein of Bonesaw's power," I said. "If what you make is poison gas, I don't think you have to worry about maintenance or mass production."

"That answer depends on the method of delivery," he said. "Or they could be making something like nanobots and _calling_ them chemical weapons. Or they aren't making chemical weapons at all, and it's something else." He stood up and stretched. "Bedtime for me. See you when you get back, if I'm still alive."

His tone was cavalier and his walk held something of a swagger as he strode off.

Whatever made him happy, so long as it didn't interfere with my ability to impress Cauldron and leverage that into information.

I collected the pancakes he'd left and went upstairs to throw them away. When I got back to the kitchen, Teratoma and the twins were clearing breakfast and Blitzeis-contrary to what he'd told me earlier in the day-was feeding the puppy. Wrath was still gone, and none of the others knew or seemed to care what he was up to.

Mercurial was upstairs with Reset. When they came down, they both held a banded stack of hundred dollar bills in each hand.

"Where did you get those?" I asked.

"Mercurial keeps our entire operating budget under her mattress," Teratoma said.

Mercurial was stuffing the money into the deep pockets of the brown leather jacket she was wearing. "Do not," she said, and looked at me. "The majority of the team assets are electronic and Cauldron's broker helps us draw on them as necessary."

"And spending forty grand on clothes isn't something they consider necessary," Blitzeis interjected. "So she collected—"

"Stole," Teratoma said from where she'd plopped onto the couch.

I looked at Mercurial. She shrugged.

"She _collected_ money on her own to make up for it. How much do you have? Five million dollars? Ten?"

She thought about it for a moment. "I guess it's around eight, but it's in a lot of different currencies, and most are only good in one specific country in one specific dimension. Ready, Reset?"

"You're going now? With a mission so soon?" I asked.

"We won't be gone long," Mercurial assured me. "We have ninety minutes and I don't need to do anything to get ready. Door, mall four."

I blinked. Ninety minutes? I wasn't used to so much prep time, and an hour and a half was longer than most actual fights I'd been in.

The first thing I did was stop my spiders from making my costume and have them start drawing out lines of silk. I'd need to have a significant amount of pre-made lines ready to go. After some hesitation, I loaded the semiautomatic and attached the holster to my hip.

I collected my baton and turned my attention to my phone. I didn't do the majority of my surveillance with my _eyes_ , so I thought I might get some reading done while I was out there. I followed the Number Man's advice from the day before and downloaded a few manuals about marksmanship.

Then I searched for information on ways to deploy chemical weapons. I should have an idea of what I might run into.

The answer, it turned out, was "mostly explosives." How was I supposed to distinguish chemical rounds from normal rounds? Some countries painted their munitions to make things clear, but there was no reason to assume that would be the case if I saw them. Maybe I'd have to collect samples of what I saw and bring them back to Cauldron for analysis.

Wrath finally returned about twenty minutes before we had to go. He was carrying a blackish blue and white bird. It was limp, obviously dead.

"Breakfast is over," Teratoma informed him when he came in.

"I suspected as much. I ended up going out longer than I intended, nearly fifteen kilometers."

I raised an eyebrow. "You went all that way for a magpie?"

"I had to in order to find one that was already dying. I will dissect it today."

"Not on the kitchen table, this time," Blitzeis said.

"Why?" I asked.

"I intend to document and catalogue all species in this particular ecosystem."

"I can help you with the arthropods," I offered. "There are probably some you haven't been able to see. I don't know how long you need for your end of the project, but it would only take me about an hour to get them all in here."

He nodded. "That's gracious of you," he said. "Thank you."

"No problem. But can it wait? We have a mission in a few minutes and I think it would be a good idea if you came."

He regarded the magpie with a look of regret and then moved to put it in the freezer.

Blitzeis made an irritated noise. "You need to get your own freezer if you want to do that."

Wrath ignored him. "What is the task?"

"There's a chemical weapons factory might have tinker support," I said, passing my phone over to him. "We're supposed to watch it for a while."

Mercurial and Reset came back from the mall as Wrath was examining the message and picture. Reset, now wearing jeans and a black sweater, followed her back inside. His arms were full of bags and boxes.

"Feel any better?" I asked.

"Not really," he said, and I cringed internally. I shouldn't have said anything. He kicked the door to the stairwell open. "I'm going to go put these away."

Mercurial held the single bag she was holding out to me. I looked inside and found a black softshell jacket.

"Thanks," I said uncertainly.

"The brand," she said.

I unfolded it and examined it more closely. This time I noticed the spider emblem over the left breast.

"Oh, I see. It's nice. I like it." I put it on, trying to emphasize my thankfulness. "Thanks," I said. "Again."

"My God, Em," Teratoma said. "Our fearful leader is as bad as navigating social situations as you are."

"If you count combat as a social situation, my average goes up," I said. I didn't touch the "fearful" comment; I supposed I'd walked into it the moment I'd chastised Prominence for calling me fear _less_.

"I do, actually," she replied. "Sorry, Mercurial, you're still at the bottom."

Mercurial rolled her eyes. "Don't knock it," she said. "It's what makes me desperate enough to be your friend."

Teratoma turned the television off. "Brat," she said, sort of affectionately. "Are we going yet?"

"About ten minutes," I said.

The door opened exactly on time—I could have set my watch by it—and it opened into a small cave, which was cool enough that I became genuinely grateful that Mercurial had thought to get me a coat. The bugs I found in my radius weren't the same species I'd had to work with in Brockton Bay, but the essentials remained: spiders, wasps, flies, centipedes, worms, beetles, and, of course, cockroaches.

I directed the nearest insects to scout the area around the entrance to the cave. Nothing on the other side except trees, dirt, and, of course, bugs.

"Coast is clear," I said. "We can go out."

We were on a hill overlooking a road. Beyond that road, further away but still just within my range, was the factory itself. Our position gave us an excellent vantage point, with the rocks and plants offering a degree of concealment. It looked much the way it had in the picture and I could see that, in addition to the four guard towers, they had guards at the doors and walking around in pairs. About twenty outside. I used the zoom function on my phone's camera to give me a better view of the guards themselves. Their mostly wooden guns and gray uniforms struck me as being . . . historic. Like something out of a movie, and not what I associated with the military or the PRT.

"Want me to go?" Mercurial asked.

"Not yet," I said. "Let me get an idea of what we're looking at first."

Just as I'd begun to call the useful bugs in the surrounding area toward me, I started moving the ones that were in the factory already around. I didn't want to use too many bugs in case the workers or guards got suspicious, but I was able to get a sense of how things were laid out. When I was done, I backed up, colliding with something I hadn't sensed with my bugs. I turned and looked down. The male twin was there, sitting with his back against a tree. He was shirtless but still wearing the trench coat he'd been in yesterday.

"Where'd you come from?" I asked. I was more startled than I should have been, and it reminded me that at least some people could still sneak up on me. I assumed his power give him enough awareness of his surroundings that he could choose to avoid my swarm the way Mannequin had.

He shrugged.

"Did you at least tell Blitzeis you were coming?"

"No," he said.

"You should tell him where you're going next time," I said.

He looked at his hands. "Okay."

"Can you tell what I'm doing with the spiders? Can you sense the tripwires I'm setting up?" I asked, trying to get an idea of his range.

"Yeah. Mine are better."

I had no idea what to say to that, so I focused on drawing out a map of the complex in the dirt in front of us. "Hallways here and here," I said. "They have living areas off to the west side along this hall, and I'd say there's another twenty or thirty guards there now, asleep. The production floor is here, with about twenty workers lined up on the north side of the conveyor belt, with a second-story office overlooking it all. There are five men in the office, and they don't seem to be very engaged. I think we need to get a look at what they have and then start comparing it to known delivery methods and see if there's anything that screams tinkertech." I turned to Mercurial. "Are you ready?" I asked.

She grimaced.

Then she melted. Hair and clothes merged with skin, features and limbs blurred and collapsed. Within twenty seconds, there was nothing left of her but a grayish puddle on the ground. Ten seconds after _that_ , the puddle finished taking on the colors of the surrounding area.

Then the puddle started sliding along the ground. I hastily put a fly on her so I could track her location.

"Does her power affect what she wears?" I asked when she was gone.

"No," Teratoma said. "She forces her body to make it look like she's wearing clothes when she actually isn't. She doesn't feel pain, but she says that maintaining a form that isn't human is _uncomfortable_ , so she only does it when we're about to go out on a mission."

As I traced her progress as she slid out of the forest we were in, down the hill, and under the barbed wire, I wondered why she didn't just wear clothes out and take them off before she changed.

I was surprised to see how rapidly she moved despite her size and lack of legs, and within five minutes she'd infiltrated the complex by simply slipping in past the imperfectly sealed door.

She'd gotten about twenty feet inside before one of the men in the office I'd noticed earlier jumped up and shouted something.

Then he pushed a button, and my bugs alerted me to the sound of bells ringing throughout the factory.

Alarms.


	21. Demonstration 4

**Demonstration 4.4**

The effect of the alarm—a continuous ringing noise, something you'd get from an old-fashioned school bell—was instantaneous. The guards who were asleep started jumping out of bed and reaching for their gear, not even bothering to change as they slid on gasmasks and trenchcoats.

Four of the five men in the office, including the one who had sounded the alarm, got up from their seats and started to move. All were armed, three with pistols and one with a bigger gun that hung from a strap around his neck.

For my part, I threaded silk across the stairs in an attempt to bar their path, but I didn't have enough spiders on hand to stop or even trip them.

Assuming everyone from the office was a parahuman, that meant there were five capes, augmented by roughly twenty-five guards—inside. There were another thirty outside.

"Problem," I said. "I'm pretty sure they just detected Mercurial."

"You can't see her with cameras unless they're very good cameras and you're paying very close attention," Teratoma said.

"No security cameras," I said. "They don't have anything with a screen, only a couple of typewriters. The tech here doesn't seem to be that advanced."

"Any guards around? A quick-eyed normal can spot her."

I shook my head.

"It's probably nothing, then," she said.

"Well, either they just happened to sound an alarm for no reason I can see the moment she got inside and are sending guards to the hallway she's in, or the guy who sounded the alarm can detect parahumans from a distance. I would guess thinker, but it's probably a secondary power that augments something else."

As I drew the conclusion, I coalesced the bugs within easy distance of Mercurial into a decoy "standing" directly above her in the hope that they might very well mistake the swarm for the parahuman they wanted.

"Then our mission is accomplished," Wrath said. "These people do have parahumans augmenting their war effort."

Even as he said this, I was giving Mercurial directions through the swarm.

 _They noticed you_ , I said. _Get out of the hallway. There's a vent to your right. Don't retreat back here until I say so, because if you do, they'll follow you back to us._

"Not by a long shot," I said to him. "We don't know anything about their chemical weapons program, we don't know whether it's just here or whether they're entrenched everywhere, we don't know what any of their powers are. And we have to get Mercurial out and back here without her being followed. I don't imagine Cauldron will open the door again if there's a chance someone else will see it, will they?"

The man left in the office turned the alarm off and started to shout through a loudspeaker system. Some of the speakers were outside and the words were loud enough I could hear them with my ears.

"Intruder," Wrath said, translating. "East hallway, moving slowly. Known extra-human abilities. Kill on sight. Stay alert in case of additional attack from outside. Intruder . . ."

My first inclination in their shoes would be to want to capture and interrogate an intruder, but I supposed it made sense they'd want to kill an unknown parahuman. Attempting to contain a master or a stranger could easily backfire; better to shoot to kill than fall prey to someone like Cherish. I directed beetles and cockroaches to chew through all the wiring I could find.

"I take it that Mercurial's hard to contain," I said.

"Like sentient water that doesn't want to be caught," Teratoma confirmed.

"What if I wanted to kill her?" I asked as I took some of the silk lines I'd created in the ninety minutes before we'd arrived and directed some nearby flyers—dragonflies and beetles, mostly—to take the ropes down to where the fight was. "Would shooting her work?"

"Not really. You'd eventually run out of bullets and she'd reconstitute. She wouldn't be _happy_ and she wouldn't be _fast_ , but she also wouldn't be _dead_."

I nodded and considered how I'd counter her power. I could do something like I'd done with Shadow Stalker, and run my swarm through her body, or I could use threads to divide her while she was in a liquid form and maybe interfere with her ability to reconstitute. I briefly wondered why she ate, or pretended to sleep, and then several things happened at once.

Mercurial herself finished oozing—dripping?—through a vent off to one side of the corridor she was in. My sense from the flies that were with her was that she was still intent on getting through to the production room. Then the first handful of guards reached the hallway where my swarm decoy stood waiting for them. True to their orders, they didn't hesitate to open fire.

I directed all my bugs to drop to the floor and had them spend a few seconds there before abruptly reforming them into three decoys. One of them shouted, either out of surprise or alarm, but they continued to fire. I repeated the maneuver. The bugs I'd tasked to chew through the wiring finally succeeded, and the guards were treated to the sight of nine decoys advancing on them just before the lights went out.

That, followed by my onslaught, resulted in a lot more shouting—and screaming.

The four men from the office, who were by now almost at the hallway, stopped when the power died. The one in front, the man who'd first sounded the alarm, flicked a flashlight on. Then he said something and pointed to the wall through which Mercurial was moving. One of his companions split himself in two—another parahuman. His original self seemed to get lighter, more incorporeal, while the other started slamming his fists into the wall, willingly damaging the building in order to get at her. It seemed that the clone got as strong and dense as the original got weak and light.

Neat trick, and one I didn't have a ready counter for. My bugs couldn't break the skin of the dense one and didn't seem to disrupt the other's form. It seemed I couldn't even annoy him, let alone take him out.

That said, I _could_ attack his guide, and I did. I had very few venomous spiders available—a few members of a single species that I didn't recognize—and I held them in reserve, but I deployed flying insects to bite and sting. He tried to swat the bugs away and, when the swarm pressed into his ears and nose regardless of his efforts, dropped the flashlight. It shattered, immersing the five in darkness and successfully distracting them from Mercurial's location. She slipped further down the hallway, toward the production room.

By this point, the ropes I'd made earlier with the Darwin's bark spiders arrived at the perimeter of the complex. I sent the ropes along with a swarm up the sides of each of the towers.

In the minute it took to scale the towers, one of the four men began to unleash what I assumed were fireballs. Some form of hot, bright, and golf-ball sized projectile, anyway—a blaster, trying to illuminate the hallway and kill my bugs. Considering that his projectiles dissipated on contact with anything they hit, however small, and that I had a lot of bugs around them, he wasn't doing very well.

The non-powered guards whom I'd attacked with the decoys were trying to flee through the dark corridors. Unable to see and presumably panicked, they collided with the ones who hadn't been as fast to respond. The primal fear resulting from being attacked in the dark by monsters combined with disorientation and a lack of direction—none of them could talk without choking on bugs—and what had been a disciplined platoon effectively dissolved into a riot. A few men went down and were caught underfoot as others attempted to scramble away.

 _This is overkill_ , I thought a little guiltily. The unpowered soldiers weren't on the level of PRT squads or Coil's snipers and didn't really have a chance, and the parahumans who supported them didn't seem to be very experienced. So far I'd encountered a man who could detect parahumans, a low-level blaster who couldn't seriously attempt to kill my swarm unless he was willing to harm his friends, and a brute/master who wouldn't be a problem unless he could find me. I assumed the one who stayed behind in the office was the tinker, which left only one I didn't have a good handle on. I suspected that if his power were an effective counter to mine, he'd already have used it.

Meanwhile, my swarms outside reached their destination and set about overwhelming the guards. My companions were able to hear their shouts of surprise and alarm and see the ineffectual flailing. I was surprised to see just how grim it looked from this perspective, a good quarter-mile away.

Teratoma lowered her binoculars and bared her teeth in something that I supposed I could have mistaken for a smile if I'd never experienced the trio's antics. "I like watching you work, Weaver," she said.

I ignored her and focused on tying the guards up, acting with an eye to removing them from the fight without hurting them.

I was successful-for the most part.

One unlucky guardsman on the tower second nearest to us threw himself backwards in an effort to escape the encroaching insects. He might have been okay if he hadn't been wearing the helmet or the belt of ammunition; as it was, he lost his balance, became top-heavy, and accidentally sent himself toppling over the railing.

I couldn't stop myself from wincing as he hit the ground.

"That man is dying," Wrath said.

Teratoma squinted through the binoculars. "So he is," she said. "Not very quickly, though."

I winced again. Another death on my hands.

"Broken bones, probably internal bleeding, but he's close enough I'm pretty sure we have time," Teratoma said.

"Time for what? What are you thinking?" I asked.

They utterly ignored me; I wasn't even sure if they'd even heard me.

Instead, Teratoma began to transform. Thus far she'd presented herself as basically human-looking, albeit black and shiny like an old vinyl record—obviously out of the ordinary, but nothing monstrous. That changed as I watched. Her skin went dull, then started to swell and bulge at random intervals until she was covered to an unrecognizable extent in tumors, thick callouses, jagged barbs, and short, blunted, _wriggling_ . . . appendages. Now a hulking monster over a foot taller than she'd started out as, she followed Wrath out of the clearing.

"Stop," I said when I realized they were intending to leave the concealment offered by the trees we were hiding among. " _Stop!_ "

But they'd already cleared the edge of the forest and were charging down the hill at full speed. Worse, mist poured from Wrath, more expansive and a much deeper red than he'd shown before. The bright red fog streaked down the hill as the two ran, highlighting our position for all to see.


	22. Demonstration 5

**Demonstration 4.5**

I'd been in plenty of fights that had taken turns for the worse. Lung had revealed his super-senses, trapping me on the roof. Bakuda had captured me and the rest of the Undersiders. Mannequin had fled, leaving us to face Burnscar and a completely different tactical situation. Bonesaw had ambushed me and Coil had managed to take part of my swarm from me. The heroes had failed to take our warnings seriously and caused all sorts of problems with Echidna.

I'd never been in a fight that had gone south because _my team_ spontaneously decided to get stupid and disregard the mission.

Worse, I hadn't finished restraining all the guards, and two were able to man one of the machine guns. They fired for about thirty seconds using Wrath's trail as a target before I was able to subdue them. As inept as they were when dealing with an unexpected parahuman attack, they _did_ know how to handle their weaponry, and their aim was dead on.

Something I didn't expect happened to the bullets as they entered the mist: they slowed rapidly, to the point where I could track them with my swarm. As they continued their approach to Wrath, tendrils of fog seemed to contort, curling around the bullets and _slamming_ them into the ground.

The remaining rounds struck Teratoma and caused some of the cysts on the armor she'd grown to burst. She didn't slow down or otherwise seem to care, but I saw black, ink-like splotches punctuating the scarlet mist.

I knew you weren't supposed to move a patient who had a possible neck or back injury, but that was exactly what they did to the fallen man. Wrath grabbed his arms, Teratoma grabbed him by the knees, and they hoisted him off the ground.

"Door," Wrath said.

I couldn't see the resulting portal with my eyes because the mist obscured it, but I accompanied them with a host of flying insects as they hauled the man through the portal. My bugs started to die quickly as the Custodian ripped through them.

Even so, I got a good idea of what they were doing. The room on the other side was empty except for a small cylinder. Teratoma dropped his legs, heedless of the pain or damage she might have caused, and picked up the cylinder. She unscrewed the top and withdrew a glass vial, which she unstoppered.

"Open his mouth," she told Wrath. He did, and she forced the contents of the vial down their victim's— _my_ victim's—throat.

He coughed once or twice during the time it took for the two to come back to the world I was standing in.

The door closed as he started to scream.

I looked down at my hands.

They were shaking.

That was an understatement. My entire body was _trembling_ , and I sat down on a log so I wouldn't fall. I couldn't explain, even to myself, what I was feeling right now. Part of it was adrenaline that the relatively low-stakes, one-sided battle I'd been fighting hadn't called forth. Part of it was guilt over accidentally killing someone, which was fast being overridden by fear that I'd done something far worse.

But mostly I was _shocked_.

Not surprised, not really, not if I was being honest with myself. Alexandria had told us that they'd stopped experimentation, but that had been in the same conversation where she had claimed that Cauldron would cut her and Eidolon off. I should have known that they were still at it.

I also should have guessed that it would be ugly; I possibly could even have foreseen _this_ , if I'd thought through the implications. It wasn't as though they would have had _Alexandria_ flying around snatching people out of their homes.

The incident had so distracted me I'd subconsciously discontinued my attacks on the thinker who could track Mercurial, and he was starting to recover. He coughed to clear the bugs from his mouth and started talking to the other parahumans on his team and start them moving toward the production floor.

I didn't move to stop them just yet. Instead, I stood back up to take a look at what the others were doing. Wrath had stopped producing as much mist, and they stood at the foot of the tower looking around. Teratoma was using her power to make cysts grow from the wood the tower was made of, and they swelled and burst, sending more of the black fluid over the guards I had already subdued. I didn't think that was necessary, but they both seemed kind of lost now that the kidnapping was over.

Any chance that this was going to be a successful surveillance mission was over, but it could still be an effective _raid_. We still didn't know exactly what they were making, and I doubted Mercurial could easily get samples or documentation _and_ deal with the opposition. We'd have to go in.

Specifically, _I_ would have to go in.

"Hey," I said to the boy who was sitting behind me. "Question about your power."

He looked up at me.

"Do you choose when your traps go off?"

He scratched his neck. "I think so. Yeah."

"If I leave you here, can you build traps to make sure you'll be safe while I'm gone? And can you make them so that they won't hurt the rest of us when come back?"

"I'll try." His forehead creased. "How long will it take?"

"I'm not sure," I said. I picked out one of the butterflies from my swarm, a black one with a green pattern on its wings, and put it on the back of his hand. "Just talk to her if you need something. The rest of my bugs will be able to tell what's happening here the entire time. If something bad happens, I'll come back."

He nodded and I started creating swarm decoys to cover my movement. I created fifteen and maneuvered them down the hill, concealing myself in the third to last.

Teratoma was smiling when I arrived. Her teeth were an unnervingly human spot in her otherwise distorted face. "I cannot _believe_ you wanted to be a hero. Your power was _made_ for villainy."

"Come on," I said, walking past them both. "We need to see what they're making here and get out."

I took them in through a different hallway than the one Mercurial had gone in, which was still filled with a few straggling guards tending to their wounded. I didn't want anyone else to be kidnapped. Wrath and Teratoma easily kept up with me. I hadn't asked whether they'd both be able to see in the dark building. Since both their powers involved obscuring vision, it made sense to suppose they could see or at least navigate the environment the way my bugs helped me.

Mercurial had reached the production floor while I'd been making my way to Wrath and Teratoma. Despite the comparatively small size of the complex, her blind and limping pursuers hadn't caught up with her, and she was slowly reforming herself into a humanoid shape out of reach of the eight or nine workers who were bumbling around the room trying to figure out how to restore the lights.

The thinker grabbed the shoulder of his fire blaster comrade and said something, bringing all four of them to a halt. He was gesturing in our direction. We were close enough to the other parahumans that we all heard them.

"Whoever that was noticed us," Wrath said. He listened a moment longer. "And he has an idea of what our powers are."

I nodded, then realized they probably couldn't see it. "Yes, he's the one who spotted Mercurial." I swarmed them again, which didn't slow the brute down in the slightest. "He can detect parahumans at the least. Looks like they've forgotten about her and are on their way to us."

The thinker was shouting now. "Voran. Fass!"

"They're coming to attack us," Wrath said. "They want to take you down first."

I wished I had my costume complete. I wasn't _completely_ sure it would stand up to a hail of bullets from a submachine gun, but I'd be a hell of a lot more comfortable wearing that than I was now. I drew my baton and extended it to its full length.

"Take a right at the fork," I said. "That will take us directly to the production line. We'll grab whatever papers and samples we can and go. Teratoma, is it safe for you to be shot outside of Wrath's mist?"

"Yeah."

"Can you take care of the four on our tail? Make them hallucinate, keep them occupied until we leave?"

"My pleasure," she said, and ran-bounded?-off in their direction.

I trusted her to keep them occupied and hoped she wouldn't try to abduct any of them. When Wrath and I finally reached our objective, I directed him to search for paperwork. I already knew exactly what I wanted: a stack of wooden crates positioned near some doors that were big enough to allow trucks to enter. I used my knife to pry one open, and inside I found about a dozen egg-shaped objects embedded in straw. I couldn't see them, but I had a hunch they were the weapons in question.

My suspicions were confirmed when I checked on what the man in the office was doing. He was bent over a similar-looking egg, fiddling with unfamiliar tools. He was also wearing a gas mask and gloves, which prevented me from attacking his eyes or hands.

"Tinkers," I cursed. In his place, I'd be trying to go for an insecticide like the one Bonesaw had used, and I didn't want to have to deal with that again. _Heads up_ , I said through my swarm. _The tinker in the office is putting something together._

"Mercurial," I called. "Can you see?"

"Not really," she said.

"Okay. If you move about ten feet to your right, you'll find some stairs. Go up them and make sure the guy inside doesn't open the door that's at the top. We'll clear that room last, because that's where all the documentation is. In the meantime, I don't want the man inside getting loose."

As she made her way over to the stairs, I looked around for something I could carry the weapons in. My bugs detected a canvas bag slung over the shoulder of one of the workers. I walked up behind him and hit him in the back of the knee with my baton and relieved him of the bag. I emptied it—my bugs didn't recognize the contents and I couldn't see them to otherwise identify them—and started shoving as many eggs into the bag as I could fit.

Upstairs, Mercurial was fighting with the Tinker, who was trying to open the door. After about thirty seconds, he gave up and instead trained his pistol on the window overlooking the production floor. He shot the window to pieces and hurled his egg—grenade, I realized—out. Thinking of what Coil had said about how throwing grenades at me would backfire, I sent a group of my bugs to cluster on it and move it back into a corner, away from everyone else.

"Weaver!"

The boy I'd left near the portal was talking to the butterfly. Shouting at it, to be more accurate. I'd have to explain that the other bugs in the area could also hear him and yelling wasn't necessary.

 _What is it?_ I asked.

"There are going to be guys here soon," he said. "They're going to find me."

There was a precognitive element to his power, but I couldn't remember from the files how far into the future he could see. _When will they get there?_

"Um, a few seconds," he said. "They'll find me in a minute."

He hadn't finished speaking before five other men abruptly appeared in my range, all armed with rifles and wearing . . . _something_ over their faces. Masks, here? The man at the center of the group disappeared. A teleporter, bringing in others? I'd seen the same tactic just before the Leviathan fight.

The four left behind started to fan out as they moved towards the base. They were _very_ close to both the cave we'd come out of and my teammate. I would have missed what happened next but for the presence of some fleas on a nearby squirrel who was apparently startled by their approach. The squirrel jumped off the branch it was sitting on, and the branch, suddenly free from the squirrel's weight, abruptly swung upwards. The branch crashed into another tree limb, which fell down onto the man's head.

If it weren't for his wide-brimmed metal helmet, he'd have sustained a serious injury. As it was, he fell on his ass and slid backwards down the other side of the hill.

"Don't botch this one, too, Bert," said one of the other men, shaking his head. It was hard to read tone through my bugs, and I could barely hear him through the mask on his face, but I thought he was jeering.

"It wasn't my fault," the other man said as he picked himself up. He unslung his rifle and rose into the air, hovering about three feet above the ground. "Something made that bloody squirrel jump on purpose."

It seemed that the other side in this war _also_ had parahumans, and that they were likely to mistake us for their enemy.

I started to warn my allies that we were about to have another fight on our hands, but the tinker device I'd cornered started to hiss, releasing a gas. My bugs nearby twitched and died as the gas reached them, and one of the factory workers who was cowering nearby started to choke.

 _Right_ , I thought, and covered my nose and mouth _._ _Chemical weapons._


	23. Demonstration 6

**Demonstration 4.6**

Alexandria flicked her finger along the screen of her tablet computer as she absorbed the report that had taken me two and a half hours to write in a matter of seconds.

She scrolled back up and read it again more slowly. I knew she didn't have to reread it, so it was for show. Then she swiveled her chair around to face me, one eyebrow raised.

"This was meant to be a week-long surveillance mission," she said. "An orientation, to get you integrated into your team."

What I was I supposed to say to that? Nothing ever went according to plan, and she should know that. Even if she somehow had forgotten it over the course of twenty-five years of cape work, the choking panic I'd sent her into a couple weeks ago should have served as a reminder.

I didn't have my swarm with me and so I controlled my emotions by clenching my fists behind my back and focusing on my surroundings. The wall behind her was a window like the Number Man's, except the portal opened into another office that overlooked a city I recognized as Los Angeles. _A_ Los Angeles, anyway.

Two other walls were actually whiteboards—or were just white walls being used as whiteboards, I couldn't really tell. Half of one was taken up by an elaborate equation that contained more letters and symbols than numbers. Every square inch, floor to ceiling, of the other was covered in tiny, precise handwriting. I could pick out timetables, more equations, combinations of letters and numbers not apparently referencing anything else, and words in at least eight different languages. Some of these I recognized as names of capes and locations on Bet.

As I was idly wondering why she felt the need to take notes when she could remember everything, Alexandria resumed talking. I probably hadn't given her the response she'd been looking for. "You killed or disabled sixty non-parahuman guards, destroyed the factory, kidnapped the tinker behind it, and picked a fight with a parahuman contingent of that world's British military in less than forty minutes."

"Things moved quickly," I said. My tone made it sound like _go fuck yourself_. I didn't plan on letting her provoke me into losing control again, but I wasn't about to hide my anger. Not about this.

"Correction. _You_ moved quickly," she said. "You sent in your changer after a minute or two of cursory observation and went on the offensive the moment she was spotted."

"You know I can't see through my bugs. I wanted to have a better sense of what was going on inside, and then I had to respond to the threat to my teammate."

"Considering the mission parameters and the possibility of parahumans with unknown powers, why did you not simply _watch_ for a little while before attempting to go inside? Why did you choose not to get a sense of the shifts, who came and went, delivery schedules, and so on before charging in? You said that your most experienced team member had spent the night tinkering and was therefore sleeping at the time, so why not simply observe things until _he was_ awake to evaluate the situation?"

"Are you seriously trying to turn this clusterfuck back onto _me_?" I growled. "I had it under control until your goddamned _brainwashing_ kicked in and set Teratoma and Wrath off on a kidnapping spree."

Cornering Wrath and Teratoma had been the first thing I'd done after we'd gotten back. I'd gotten nothing but blank stares in response until Prominence, awakened by the commotion my increasingly loud demands for an explanation, had taken me aside and explained that they were compelled to "rescue" people they thought were on the brink of death.

Alexandria pinched the bridge of her nose and fell silent for about a minute. Finally she lowered her hand and met my eye. "You wanted to join the Wards."

I shook my head. "I was _willing_ to join the Wards in order to do what Dinah said, willing to accept the probation and restrictions and bullshit so I could 'cut ties.' A sacrifice for a greater purpose."

"Quite. You do _understand_ that if that had gone through, you would have had to go through after action reviews to determine what to sustain for future missions and what to improve on—in a word, to answer questions like the ones I am asking now? It's to _train_ , not to fix blame."

"You're only saying that because the blame belongs to _you_ ," I said heatedly. "You bastards did something when you wiped their memories. You made them _have_ to pick up dying people so you could get more subjects."

"Yes," she said. No hesitation, no hint of remorse. "It may be of interest to you to learn that the man you would have killed is actually alive and well, thanks to their efforts. Why did you make the call you did?"

"Because I'm not here for you," I snapped. "I'm here to get what I need to save the world. The faster I knock down the targets you set up, the faster I get that information and focus on what matters." It was like what I'd had to do with Coil all over again, proving myself valuable enough that they'd give up something they valued far more than my service, only it was their secrecy instead of a precognitive girl. "And it would be a lot simpler if you people didn't have your heads up your asses."

"Nothing you did today indicates you're at all trustworthy," she said. "Do you understand why?"

"Because you already made up your mind not to tell me," I said.

She shook her head, and there was a little bit of irritation in her body language. "Secrecy is our _default_ course of action. Can you point to any single action you took today and claim that it shows that you're at all responsible? Use it to argue that you deserve a higher clearance than, say, Legend did?"

I didn't have a good answer for that. I chose to treat it as a distraction. "Why," I said, "do I get the feeling that I could do _anything_ and that would still be your answer? Think about what would have happened if I _had_ just sat and watched. The British parahumans would still have shown up, and I wouldn't have had the leverage to buy them off. Then this conversation would have been about how irresponsible I was to get ambushed."

"You've found strength in improvisation," Alexandria said, basically ignoring my counterpoints. "You get the bare outline of a plan and throw yourself into conflict, because you're confident that raising the stakes will inspire you to dig deeper, develop a creative solution to the problem. Essentially, you seek out combat because that's where you're most sure of yourself, most _comfortable_. Other options simply don't occur to you."

I flinched. Brian had said something along those lines after his second trigger event. Hearing the most brutal of his criticisms from _her_ . . .

"Think about the core of your team," she said. "A speedster, a shaker with a stranger element, a shaker with a brute element, and a changer with a strong stranger role. This is a team that is designed for covert missions, not fisticuffs."

"You should probably have spelled this out somewhere," I said. "Or given me time to read all the old files before you gave me a mission. So I went in blind, and things happened. And _because_ I was in the dark, _because_ I didn't know what was going on, I thought I was working with complete idiots."

"You've made your feelings clear," she said. "And the British?"

"Tripwire gave me some warning," I said.

"Tripwire?"

"You'd call him three-two-seven-seven," I said. "You took away his real name."

"Ah, yes. The inexperienced child you left to fend for himself in the middle of a battle," she said. She switched windows on her computer to bring up the file on Subject 3277, making a note of the new name without bothering to respond to my jab about his old one. "He was promptly taken hostage by hostile parahumans."

"I got him back," I said, fully aware of how defensive I was sounding.

Alexandria smiled—actually smiled. "Now that _was_ clever," she said. Despite my better judgment, there was a part of me that glowed at that sign of approval and wanted _more_ ; as a person, she was despicable, but as a cape, she was one of the most able and experienced around. "You told them you were an operative for American intelligence and traded them someone they _thought_ was the tinker in exchange for your thinker. Walk me through your thought process there."

"I didn't know what their powers were, and they'd found Tripwire by the time we'd subdued the tinker," I said. "That meant they had a hostage, and so fighting seemed like a bad idea. I knew from what they were saying to each other that they were on the lookout for more parahumans. Tinkers are pretty valuable and they were at the same factory we were, so I thought I could give them what they wanted."

"Yet you didn't give them the tinker. You lied to them."

I hesitated. "It wasn't my first idea," I said. "But Wrath can speak German, and he discovered that one of the capes we'd already captured, the same one who could track our locations, had the ability to create a visual copy of any cape within his range. It seemed like we could give the other capes what they wanted without giving up the tinker himself. We got him to pretend to make a grenade that could release chlorine gas, and the British capes agreed to trade Tripwire back to us."

" _That_ is the kind of solution we'd prefer you to come up with, though I'm still unclear on how you persuaded him to go along with the lie."

"We gave them a choice," I said. While Mercurial and I had been settling business with the tinker, Teratoma had trapped the other four in their own minds. The hallucinations caused by the fluid she released were _bad_ —bad enough that the men affected by them would rather lie to and be captured by the enemy than face them again. If the dreams were anything like what I'd experienced in Echidna, I could sympathize. "Either they would cooperate or Teratoma would use her power on them again, and they _really_ wanted to get away."

Alexandria nodded. "Still a little heavy-handed, but closer to what we were expecting. Which brings me to my last question. _Why_ did you bring him here?"

I looked over my shoulder. There was a man lying on the floor, bound in spider silk and glaring at us both. The tinker who'd thrown the grenade at us—a gambit that might have worked had I not been the only one of his targets with conventional biology. Mercurial had jumped on it, containing both the grenade and the poison it was spewing inside of her torso, and I'd used my baton to talk him into surrendering.

I shrugged. "Prominence thinks Cauldron collects tinkers."

"I suppose I can see where he got that impression," she said. "That said, this particular one's specialty is not of interest. Not one of the enemies we need help against is human, and I don't imagine any of the hero organizations out there would appreciate being offered someone with a knack for creating biological and chemical weapons."

"What," I said, "Do you want me to put him back?"

She seemed to favor conveying skepticism with her left eyebrow, which highlighted the scar Siberian had left. I wondered if it was deliberate, an unsubtle reminder that the person on the other end of that eyebrow was contradicting or arguing with or being judged by _fucking Alexandria_. Even though I knew exactly how vulnerable she was, I was still a little intimidated. "Was that really your first thought?" she asked.

"No," I admitted. "I was thinking how short-sighted you would be to assume that he doesn't have anything to offer because his specialty can be lethal. Knockout gas, insecticide, something like pepper spray—tinkers can do a lot, and they're never fun to fight."

She nodded. "Better," she said. "We'll find a position where he will be of use. Door, Weaver's base."

I took the open door for the dismissal it was.

Of the four people Alexandria had called the core of my team, only Blitzeis acknowledged me when I came back. Prominence was in his workshop and Reset didn't seem to be up to talking, and we sat down to dinner in awkward silence. I didn't think the twins were aware of the tension at the table, but they'd reverted to not talking. I uneasily wondered if Tripwire had only been talking to me during the mission because of the brainwashing telling him to obey the team leader.

The same mechanism that made them look to me for direction was the same reason they were supposed to "rescue" people. Had I confused them by telling them not to do something they thought they had to? Did they perceive my anger at the experimentation as a rejection of _them_? Were they simply upset I'd lost my temper? Throw in my discomfort with the knowledge that I could force them to do pretty much anything, and you had a knot I couldn't even think of untangling.

"We went to a city on Earth 906 about a year and a half ago," Teratoma said about six minutes in. Her voice bore no trace of her usual mocking tone. "It was hit by a firebomb."

"Atomic bomb," Mercurial said.

I couldn't read the glance that Teratoma shot Mercurial. She'd changed clothes and she'd mostly returned to normal, but her face was still distorted by the tumorous bulges. "A bomb that set everything on fire," Teratoma said. "Including the people. Most of them we found were too far gone, between the fire and the flesh-melting waves."

Mercurial sighed. "Radiation poisoning," she said.

"My _point_ is that I found a burning, melted girl there and we had just enough time to take her away. We know that's where we come from because a few days later, they dropped her off _here_. She can't remember anything about that city, but she's fine. No fire or radiations, as you see."

"Irreparable brain damage, though," Blitzeis said. "At least, I'm assuming that's why she can stand Teratoma's sense of humor."

I glanced at Mercurial and saw that parts of her hands and neck were starting to change in color and texture to blend in with the utensils she held and the clothes she was wearing. It wasn't a _conventional_ signal, but it was clear enough. Despite the light tone Blitzeis was trying to force on the conversation, this wasn't a story _she_ wanted told. "I understand," I said, though I really, _really_ didn't. "I'm sorry for getting mad, I was just surprised and confused. It won't happen again."

My teammates perked up a little after that, possibly because I didn't explain what I'd actually meant. I didn't bother clarifying that it wouldn't happen again because I'd _make sure_ they'd never see another dying person. It was bad enough that Cauldron thought involuntary testing was acceptable, but making _me_ complicit? Never.

It was my turn to clean up, so I washed the dishes and put away the leftovers, careful not to disturb the dead bird that was still in the freezer. I reflected that it was a little strange that the unwashed corpse in my food supply was the least disturbing thing I'd encountered all day, and turned to getting ready for bed.

Despite all that had happened, I wasn't tired and I decided to get a better idea of what Cauldron thought they were _supposed_ to do—and how come that had included four people dying at once. I worked on my costume and went through old files for several hours before falling into a restless sleep.

At some point in the night, I woke up to find my bed's occupancy had quadrupled. The puppy had taken up residency between my knees and I had a twin on either side of me. The girl's head was on my chest and Tripwire had wrapped himself around my left arm. They'd rendered me immobile in much the same way the containment foam in the prison truck had.

Their presence was far more stifling.


	24. Demonstration X

**Demonstration 4.x**

Bonesaw considered bedtime to be a group activity, which made nights, or what passed for nights in the stale, sealed room, _exceptionally_ bad.

He would tuck her in and she would ask for a story. He would parrot one of the hundreds in his repertoire, something about Winter and Crimson's love or Harbinger's cleverness or Nyx's rivalry with Screamer. Then she would force him to join her so they could _snuggle_.

She was feeling lonelier than usual tonight, so she'd insisted on one of her favorites.

"And then Jack had Grey Boy loop the mean old deputy just as Breed's friends started to wiggle out of him," Rey concluded.

Bonesaw shook her head vigorously and waggled her finger at him. "You're making it sound _sad_ , but it's actually _happy_."

He didn't respond—couldn't, not that he'd want to engage with her insanity.

"See, you know what _I_ think you're doing wrong? You're identifying with the wrong person in the narrative," she went on. "You think _you're_ in a bad situation, and you think the deputy is in a bad situation, so you think it's _sad_. But that's narrow-minded. You need to approach this from a broader perspective."

Truth be told, Rey didn't have an opinion about any of it. If anything, his own experience had numbed him to anything else. He _thought_ it was too bad about Grey Boy's victims, and he _thought_ the fact Bonesaw was using _his_ seeds to create a new one was even worse, but he couldn't _feel_ that anymore.

She was so busy scolding him that she didn't notice the rectangle of light that appeared in the space on the other side of her bed. It took a few seconds to expand to the height and width of a doorway, which revealed a man standing in a daylit forest. Rey couldn't bring himself to feel optimistic about the situation; he recognized the cloak, the fanged mask, the glowing eyes from the stories he told. _Harbinger._

What got to him was the sudden sight of the sun and the trees. He wanted to cry, but Bonesaw had cauterized his tear ducts after the four hundredth or so rendition of the Love Bug theme song, leaving him with painfully dry eyes and no way to express himself. Instead, the control apparatus she'd installed reacted automatically, and he threw himself across the bed in an effort to get in between her and the possible threat.

"Hey!" Bonesaw said. "You're not supposed to—oh!"

She sprang to her feet, staring at the intruder. Her mouth was open in shock.

"Bonesaw," he said, pushing past Rey as though he weren't there. He drew a combat knife from somewhere within the folds of his costume. "You're getting to be big."

"Faker!" she screamed. "Harbinger _died_!"

She released a volley of needles, fired from mechanisms in her fingertips and arms, and Harbinger dodged or used the knife to deflect every one of the needles. "Ff—phooey! Blasto, attack!"

Rey's body stumbled forward, trying to grab hold of the man, and he received a boot to his kneecap that forced him to collapse in spite of the control apparatus. His attacker pushed down hard on his shoulder, driving Rey to the floor and helping himself vault over the bed and into Bonesaw's personal space.

At Bonesaw's command of "Blasto, up! Attack!" he struggled to his knees and then his feet. Only the metal interlaced with his bones allowed him to succeed; he could sense that his body was degrading. Weeks of performing the Love Bug dance routine had done little to maintain his muscles and nothing to prepare him for hand to hand combat.

He looked over and saw Bonesaw's right hand _shoot_ out as her forearm like a telescoping baton and exposing metal-reinforced bones. Harbinger brought the handle of his knife down onto the exposed bone, and it shattered. Her hand spasmed as it fell, and the convulsion released sprays of liquid from beneath the fingernails. One of the globs of acid landed on Rey, adding fresh layers of pain as it ate through the skin and muscle on his face and throat.

Harbinger threw her to the floor and pinned her to the ground. "Stop," he said. "Tell Blasto to stand down."

She spat.

He turned his head to one side. The spittle landed on the smooth cheek of his mask and slid off, landing on her face. Her left eye and cheekbone began to smoke. Harbinger spoke again. "Turn off the pain so we can talk."

"Blasto, stop," she said.

Rey stopped moving and stood, watching. The acid had spread to his collarbone and was spreading down across his chest.

"You're really him," she whispered. "But how? Jack said you died. Turns out you left him, _abandoned_ him . . ."

"It's true I haven't been in touch with Jack," Harbinger said. The voice that emanated from his mask sounded artificial, blurred. "But I've been watching this whole time."

" _Why?_ "

"Jack and I have always known that there was something _bigger_ , something _greater_ , something at the end of the road. Jack pursues art, as you know. I chose power."

" _We_ have power," Bonesaw said. "The power to end the world."

"You and Jack and I know that's only a beginning. I left to join another group, the one that created Nyx and Shatterbird and the Siberian."

"You're with _Cauldron_ ," she said. "How? How do you give people powers?"

"We have ways of reaching out to the passengers. Some are more successful than others." He turned his head to face Blasto. "We can always use more."

"Nuh-uh," she said. "Blasto's mine, I got him fair and square."

"I _beat_ you fair and square," he said. "Let's make a deal. I borrow Blasto to set some things in motion. One week, then I give him back."

"He won't last long," Bonesaw warned. "That stuff's going to get to his heart in a few minutes."

Rey . . . Rey was okay with dying, actually. He'd been willing to die, back in Accord's lab, but now he _wanted_ to.

"I'll patch him up for you," she said brightly, dashing his hopes.

Harbinger stood up, allowing Bonesaw to get to her feet and went over to her workbench.

"Come here, Blasto," she said, and Rey walked over to her.

"I'm modifying his programming so you can give him orders," she informed Harbinger as she worked. "And he'll sing and tell you stories if you want him! See what we've been up to since you've been gone."

"I look forward to it," Harbinger said.

Harbinger led him through the portal into the forest. As soon as they were clear of Bonesaw's dimension, a second portal opened, this one into a white room with a white bed. Two women stood there, one about Harbinger's age and wearing a tailored suit and tie. The other was in her late teens, with curly brown hair and full sleeve tattoos in black, white, and red.

Harbinger started to undress almost immediately. He was wearing a plain undershirt and grey slacks underneath the outlandish costume, and Rey thought that all he needed was a button up shirt and tie and he'd look like any white collar worker. The woman in the suit held out a pair of glasses and he put them on.

He turned to the teen with the tattoos and shook hands with her.

"This isn't good," she said. "Looks like she infected you with an airborne parasite that will start to liquefy your brain in about five days. Give me a minute."

Harbinger _smiled_. "I assume she plans to give me the antidote if I show back up with Blasto within the timeframe we agreed to."

"Yes. She means to host a tea party for you," the woman in the suit said. "I will intercept her while she's out shopping for the event and adjust her expectations."

The teen released Harbinger's hand. "You'll be fine now," she said, and the two of them looked at Rey.

"Sit down," Harbinger said, and Rey did. The teenager walked over to him and put her hand on his arm.

The pain was alleviated for the first time in weeks.

"This is going to take a while," she said. "I'm going to put you to sleep while I work."

"And the Endbringers?" was the first thing he heard when he woke up. The woman in the suit had just asked a question.

"Teacher asked the same thing. I have no idea how they fit in at all," the girl with the tattoos said. "I think they're something else entirely, not related to the lifecycle."

The woman exchanged frowns with Harbinger, and the two seemed to arrive at some sort of conclusion.

"They are more likely to be related than not. I very much doubt that we would be plagued with Endbringers had these entities you speak of never distributed powers," he said.

Tattoo Girl shrugged. "Maybe something went wrong?" she suggested. "There's no _point_ to them the way they are. Too many capes die too soon. Not enough time to get data, which is what I think the power granters are after."

"We'll look into it," the woman said. "Thank you for coming."

Harbinger handed the teen two cartons of cigarettes and a paperback copy of _Middlemarch_. "A token of our appreciation," he said. "I've opened investment accounts on behalf of you and your father spread over a dozen different worlds. We'll allow for growth, then convert to physical holdings in key resources before things go badly. Provided our organization survives the opening salvos, you and your father will have a substantial stake in how things are shaped after."

"I'll let him know," she said. She stepped around a pile of metal on the floor—the remnants of the control apparatus, he realized—and left through another portal.

"She's useful," Harbinger remarked.

The woman in the suit shook her head. "I don't like it," she said.

"I don't either," Harbinger said. "The idea that the Endbringers are caused by something wrong in the cycle is one we'll have to run past the Doctor."

The woman in the suit shook her head again. "Not what I meant," she said. "The Doctor is assuming too much risk."

Harbinger shot her a puzzled look.

"I already had to take her out of the Birdcage to heal Chevalier. Talking to her too much means she will draw certain conclusions about _us_. Or we will eventually draw Dragon's attention."

"Ah," Harbinger said. "I'll set up a meeting with the Doctor. We'll run our concerns past her and Rebecca first thing in the morning. Door."

He left through the portal that opened before him.

Rey slowly sat up. He felt _good_ now, pain-free, intact, and in control. He also felt clean and comfortable and he saw that was partially the result of the gray sweats he was wearing now. What the hell had that girl done, and how was he supposed to repay her?

The woman in the suit turned to him once Harbinger's portal had closed. "Hello, Rey," she said.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I represent Cauldron, an organization that creates and sells superpowers. You are familiar with Jack Slash's efforts to end the world."

He shuddered. He _could_ shudder. Tears started leaking out of his eyes.

She produced a handkerchief from her breast pocket and handed it over to him, and he started to sob.

When he calmed down, the woman in the suit was sweeping Harbinger's costume, the clothes he'd been wearing when Bonesaw had taken him, and the pile of tinkertech Tattoo Girl had removed from his body into a hole in the floor—a portal that opened above the mouth of a volcano.

He sniffed and fumbled with the handkerchief.

"Keep it," she said. She dropped the broom through the hole and it sealed.

Rey hiccuped. "Why did you come get me?" he asked.

"We mean to take a leaf from Jack's book," she said. "Behemoth killed more than three hundred capes during his most recent attack. We want clones to help fight Endbringers."

Dread settled in the pit of his stomach. "Who do you want me to clone?" he asked.

"We have a collection of samples similar to the ones Accord provided," she said. "You will find them downstairs in your new lab. Feel free to experiment or otherwise exercise your power how you see fit, but install the ability to kill whatever you make."

"I'd like to help you," he said, and was surprised to find that he wasn't being entirely dishonest. Even so, the initial surge of joy he'd felt at finding his body restored was starting to fade, and now he was starting to think about what he'd experienced. "But I can't promise I won't kill myself if you leave me alone."

She stared at him for a few moments, studying him. "We can help you with that," she said. "To an extent."

"I'm not—I'm not sure therapy could do much for me," he said.

"Not therapy," she said. "Memory wiping. We employ a master-class cape who can make you forget the past several weeks. Aspects of the memories would likely resurface in dreams on occasion, but you would not be troubled much."

He ran a hand through his hair. "Well," he said. "I guess there's always weed to deal with bad dreams."

"That we can provide," she replied. Nothing on her face or in her demeanor suggested that she thought the request was stupid or that she was taking it at anything other than face value. "I will arrange for a delivery tomorrow."

"Well," he said again. "Sign me the _fuck_ up."

She pointed to the nightstand near the bed he was on. A notepad and pen. "The process can be disorienting," she informed him. "You may wish to leave yourself a note to explain the gaps in your memory."

 _Dear Rey,_ he wrote. The handwriting came out a little shaky, but got stronger the more he wrote. _You were kidnapped and body-controlled by Bonesaw so she could clone the Slaughterhouse Nine and end the world. It fucking sucked. It sucked so fucking much you asked Cauldron to take the memories away. You work for them now so they can fight Endbringers. Cheers, Rey._

He set the notepad down and looked back up at the woman in the suit, who raised an eyebrow.

"Is that it?" she asked. "Are you certain you don't wish to say anything more? Perhaps a second letter with more details in case you get curious?"

Blasto didn't have to think about it, but he did anyway. _Love bugs are here, no need to cry!_ "Nah," he said, taking care to keep his voice steady. "I'll know there was a good reason for not sharing."

"Very well," she said. "Door, Two-Nine-Three."


	25. Reconnaissance in Force 1

**Reconnaissance in Force 5.1**

It took me about a week to decide the most annoying thing about living in an otherwise uninhabited universe was the lack of roads.

I was slipping, physically speaking. I hadn't been granted the freedom to run during the week and a half I'd spent in jail, and even now that I had an entire planet to myself I still couldn't go running. The only level ground in our area was taken up by the river, and its soggy banks didn't afford solid footing, and the hills were steep, rocky, heavily forested mountains. At best, I'd sprain an ankle trying to run here; at worst, I'd fall to my death and be eaten by dholes.

Depressing as the thought of having to use a treadmill was, the thought of giving up running altogether was even worse, so I compromised with myself: keep the comfort of my daily routine by converting my running regimen to a hiking one and keep up my fitness by using a treadmill three or four times a week. Starting the day after our first mission, I got up at five every morning and went for a two or two-and-a-half-hour walk.

I often had company for these excursions whether I wanted it or not; the twins had taken to following me around where and when they could, provided nothing more interesting was happening. The ceramic material encrusting Tripwire's joints made it hard for him to move and going more than fifteen or twenty minutes hurt him, so only his sister accompanied me on the longer walks. She seemed to move with more ease than most people I'd met; whereas I struggled to find purchase on the broken rocks covered in dead leaves, she practically strolled up the hills despite the thirty percent grade.

I was secretly a little grateful she wasn't awake just yet this morning. Their company didn't usually bother me because they tended to keep silent or talk in their own language and I could tune them out, but I was angry and I wanted privacy just now.

Someone, probably Alexandria, had added several files to my desktop during the night. Did they have information on the various worlds I was going to be operating on? No. Did they have complete listing of every single parahuman they'd made and their capabilities? No. Did they have a comprehensive run-down of the threat we faced and the courses of action they'd already tried? No.

The folders contained only readings and math problem sets.

The end of the world was in less than two years and they'd given me fucking homework.

To add insult to injury, the assignments I'd looked at were more suited for a college student than someone in high school. I'd been struggling my entire high school career because of the bullying. Realistically speaking, I wasn't anywhere near that level and they knew that. It was a slap in the face.

Another one.

I'd immediately deleted everything and left the base to clear my head as soon as I had enough light to see by. I set my eye on a hill I hadn't climbed yet and set off. Wrath had told me the average height of the mountains in our area was six hundred meters, which hadn't meant anything to me until I converted it to feet and found that it was well over twice the height of Captain's Hill.

I wasn't expecting the Number Man to be there, but my bugs found him sitting on a rock at the summit. I paused for a minute or two just out of his sight to catch my breath before talking to him.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, when I was composed and willing to show myself.

"Waiting for you," he said. He didn't take his eyes off the sunrise.

Ask a stupid question . . .

I tried again. "Why?"

"I was going to have tea and wondered if you wanted to join me." He brushed a fly off his shirt. "Just you, not your friends."

"I know to leave them behind," I said. It said something about Cauldron that they allowed me a loaded semiautomatic handgun but not so much as a single gnat on my visits to their headquarters, though I wasn't sure what that something was.

I wondered if the Custodian could or would check underneath my clothes. I decided to try smuggling some spiders in the next time Alexandria wanted to see me. We could solve word problems like _how many spiders does Alexandria need in her throat before she stops telling me to do algebra_.

I followed the Number Man through a portal into a kitchen that was practically the size of the entire first floor of my dad's house. True to form, there was no décor and all the appliances from the blender on the counter to the kettle on the gas stovetop were white.

The Number Man gestured at one of the stools surrounding the high granite countertop that stood in the middle of the room. There were two cups waiting, both topped with strainers. He'd expected me to say yes.

The kettle I'd noticed on my way in started to whistle just as I took my seat.

"Good timing," I said.

"Mathematics is the most reliable way humans have of making predictions, better even than most forms of precognition," he said. I couldn't pin down anything specific in his tone or body language that seemed overtly smug, but I got the sense he was showing off a little. Maybe he was simply pleased that he'd discovered a mundane use for his powers; I was reminded of the way I used bugs to hand me my toothpaste and hairbrush every morning.

"I was reviewing the casualty list for the Behemoth attack," he said as he poured the water into the cup nearer to me. The water soaked the dried flowers and leaves resting in the strainer. "Do you want me to forward it to you?"

"Yeah," I said. I needed to get a good idea of who would be available when it came time to go back to Bet. I also wanted to find out how many people I'd known hadn't made it.

"Then I should tell you that when the Undersiders were conducting search and rescue operations, Behemoth saw through Imp's power."

My heart plummeted.

Brian. He couldn't take that, not even before Bonesaw and certainly not after I . . . after he'd been left on his own.

"Regent drew the Endbringer's attention, allowing her to escape unharmed at the cost of his own life."

Alec? Dying, sacrificing himself, to save Aisha?

I could see it. Not for anyone else, but for her . . . Yeah. It fit. I was grateful for what he'd spared Brian, but I also felt more than a little guilty. I wouldn't be there to remember Regent with them. And I wouldn't be there to help Aisha—or, given how she and I weren't close, to help Brian help Aisha.

"My condolences on your loss," he said.

I nodded.

 _This is what cutting ties means._

The Number Man spoke again. "If I understand you correctly, you'll prefer to process the loss in private and focus on mission-relevant topics now."

"Yeah," I said. To turn the conversation away from myself and maybe gain some insight into him, I asked, "Are you the same way?"

"Not exactly," he replied. "It's true I don't care for emotional displays."

"Are you talking about yourself, or hinting you don't want me blubbering into my tea?"

His eyes crinkled. "Yes," he said.

"Then let's talk about the end of the world," I said. It wasn't exactly subtle, but I wasn't going to let _any_ opportunity slip past.

"I was curious about the Slaughterhouse Nine," he said, deftly refusing my request without outright saying no. "I read the file the PRT had on you when Alexandria raised the prospect of recruiting you. That note you sent then-Director Piggot made me want to ask you for more details. For such a public figure you said very little."

"Yeah, well, I was a villain," I said. "Nobody asked me what I thought. I was just automatically bad."

He removed the strainer from his tea and I followed his example. "You could have done an interview or created an online presence to assist with your public relations."

I snorted. "I was a little busy defending and improving the city," I said. "So many fights . . . I don't think the PRT even knew about all of them."

"That seems right," he agreed. "I had a better idea of what the Undersiders did before the Echidna incident because I monitored Coil's finances, but that didn't afford me insight into your thought processes."

I didn't know what to say to that. I thought what I did made sense and spoke for itself. I did my best to protect people against the real monsters in Brockton Bay. When the systems that were supposed to help failed, I picked up the slack.

"Let's start with Mannequin. His power should have countered yours, he had significantly more experience than you, and you were also protecting others—a liability in any fight, but especially dangerous against the Nine. Yet he fled you twice. How did you beat him?"

I started sipping my tea. I was a little uncomfortable talking about that. I'd driven him off, true, but I'd viewed both times as a strategic withdrawal on his part rather than a true victory on mine. "He beat me in about fifteen seconds, actually," I said. "He would have slit my throat, but my costume was too strong."

"Go on," he prompted.

I explained how I'd faked being dead to stall for time and then gummed up his weaponized limbs with paint and silk. I went on to describe the improvements he'd made the second time, and how I'd had to get help from Rachel and Brian only to be thwarted by Burnscar.

"It made us realize that defending against them one at a time just wasn't working," I concluded. "The Nine were like us, they picked their battles, and we needed to turn their model on its head. So we attacked them instead to shake things up a little."

He smiled. "You captured Cherish and Shatterbird, killed Burnscar, discovered the Siberian's weakness, and stripped Bonesaw of her hands," he said. "Most would consider that to be a resounding victory. You call it shaking things up a little."

"I don't know about that," I said slowly, thinking of Brian's second trigger and how he hadn't recovered, not really. "We only survived because of luck. My plan failed."

"One could argue that the Nine got lucky," he said. "They were lucky they got warning of the bombs before they were dropped, lucky that Bonesaw had the materials on hand to kill your bugs before you killed Manton. The fact remains you have a good instinct for tactics despite your inexperience and lack of training."

I shook my head. "My power is weak. I need to be creative and think about things from every angle. Otherwise . . . " I laughed a little. "Come on. Bugs?"

"Mm," he said. A noncommittal noise I didn't know how to interpret. "What about Jack? I know you were with him when he learned about the end of the world. The same time Battery was attacked."

I was distracted from answering by Contessa coming in through a portal. The Number Man didn't so much as bat an eye at either her abrupt entrance or the gun she held. Apparently this was normal.

"Cleanup on aisle China," she said. She held the gun and a camo-patterned pouch out to him. "Your mop and bucket."

"What am I looking for?" he asked. He was so absorbed in checking to see whether the rifle she'd given him was loaded—it was—that he didn't notice her reach behind his back and collect his cup of tea.

"New trigger, a shaker who can manipulate earth and open holes between worlds. The Yangban won't get there anytime soon and they'll botch things once they do." She stepped back through the door. "The dimensional tearing means we can't contain her."

"Tips?"

"Don't get eaten by carnivorous plants," she said just before the portal sealed.

"She stole your tea," I said.

The Number Man frowned. "I shouldn't have crowed about how well I can use my power to predict things," he said.

I couldn't tell whether he wanted me to treat his misfortune as a joke or if he was actually disappointed. "What's her power exactly? Precognition, obviously, but . . . " I trailed off, blatantly inviting him to share.

Instead of answering me, he opened the bandolier and pursed his lips. There were more magazines inside, each of them filled with bullets. "Three-oh-eight, three hundred ninety-one rounds," he said. "This should be interesting."

"I mean, was that thing about plants relevant, or, like, general life advice?" I asked.

"Never dismiss anything Contessa says," he said. "Unless it's about Munich or blue heelers. Want to come with? It's on Bet, so you'd have to leave your phone here."

I took my phone out of my pocket and set it on the table. "Done," I said.

"As for the carnivorous plants . . . " He slung the gun over his shoulder and smiled at me. "How do you feel about machetes?"


	26. Reconnaissance in Force 2

**Reconnaissance in Force 5.2**

I gave the machete an experimental swing. Compared to my baton, it felt too long, a little unwieldy. "You think this will be enough?" I asked.

The Number Man adjusted my grip on the weapon. "I trust we'll manage. You've grasped the essentials of the situation, I take it?"

"Your power," I said. "You don't need almost four hundred bullets to fight one cape."

"Correct."

"And a geokinetic shaker doesn't scream 'carnivorous plant,' to me," I added. "I'm guessing the dimensional rifts Contessa mentioned are letting things loose into Bet."

He nodded. "We're thinking along the same lines. Are you ready to go?"

"Almost," I said. We were technically standing in Cauldron's armory, but he'd opened a series of knee-high portals around us. Each led to a different place on the list I'd given him before the Behemoth attack: a wildlife preserve in Madagascar, a Central American rain forest, a Mexican desert, three separate points in Australia, and my bedroom. Where the spiders, ants, and scorpions I wanted were too far away to quickly crawl to me, I had beetles and wasps fly them in.

As I gathered and organized my swarm, I siphoned off three or four breeding pairs from the more useful species to my quarters for future use. The Number Man finished fastening a machete of his own to his belt and waited patiently, apparently utterly indifferent to the thousands of arthropods I was bringing into his base. I could sense the Custodian as well, standing—hovering, floating, whatever—with her arms folded across her chest, as though to say that just because the Number Man was allowing me to break the rules didn't mean she had to like it.

I wondered at that. To what extent did she have a personality? What did she think about all this? How had Cauldron assured her loyalty? And could I earn her trust?

"That's the last of them within easy reach," I said. I turned towards the invisible, disapproving presence. "Thanks for letting me use this room as a collection point, Custodian."

I was a little disappointed when she seemed not to respond, even once the Number Man closed the portals around us.

"Door," he said. "Mission area."

As the portal opened, I directed the bugs I had just assembled to spread out and scout the way ahead of us.

We were overlooking a valley from the top of a hill that was roughly as high and steep was the ones where I lived now, but stripped of vegetation. I could tell from looking at the hills on the opposite side of the valley that the inhabitants had carved steps out of the surrounding mountains so as to turn them into flat farmable land.

I could also tell that something disastrous had happened here. I figured the terraces I was looking at were supposed to be orderly rice paddies because Contessa had said we were going to China and that's what I assumed was in China, but there wasn't any evidence of actual cultivation. Everything I could see looked as though it had been struck by mudslides.

The door sealed once I brought the last of my swarm through. I tore my eyes away from the ruined landscape and turned my attention to the information the local bugs that teleporting had brought into my range were sending me. "Something feels wrong," I said.

"Elaborate," he replied. He didn't look at me as he spoke, focused as he was on studying the upturned earth, the bits of mortar and wood and concrete strewn about at our feet.

"This is a rural area, right?" I asked. "A farming village. There should be a lot more bugs here than there actually are. And what I am getting isn't normal."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm feeling a lot of earthworms, centipedes, things like that—bugs that live underground. I'm not feeling nearly as many surface or flying insects as I normally would."

"Perhaps our quarry smothered them when she upended everything," he suggested. "Do you detect anything alive? Humans, animals, perhaps a plant capable of eating us?"

"Nothing," I said. It was another thing that felt wrong about the feedback I was getting from my power. Between mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and other parasites, I'd been aware of every rat, bird, and stray that came into my range in Brockton Bay. I pulled some flies out of what I took to be a garbage dump. "Not even a raccoon."

"I don't believe the raccoon is endemic to this area of the world," he said. "Perhaps we will stumble across a red panda."

Was he trying to educate me on local wildlife patterns in earnest, or was he trying to be funny? I glanced at him, trying to get a better idea of his intentions. He was squatting down in the middle of the ruined building we stood in, taking care not to let the knees of his pressed khaki pants touch the dirt. Between how the Number Man presented himself and what he seemed to focus on in conversation, I had a feeling Alec would have immediately pegged him as a "dork."

"What are you seeing?" I asked.

"History. She triggered here," he said. "She was hiding, crouched down behind something that's since been destroyed. You can see how the tears in reality she made radiate out from this point. Either Contessa already had them sealed, the threat can seal them herself, or they aren't permanent."

I actually couldn't see the evidence of the sealed rifts he was talking about; it looked like he was just pointing to random points on the ground. When I reached out with my power, though, I could feel something unusual in how the underground bugs were distributed. "The portals she opened were twenty feet deep," I said.

He looked a little startled. "What makes you say that?"

"There was a rift from here off to there, right?" When he nodded, I went on. "There are normally a lot of bugs in the first foot or so of the ground. But here, bugs that should be in the top layers of the soil are way deeper than they should be. I guess that the ground split, and the dirt fell in. Took the bugs with it. Now I have a record of where the rifts were." I pointed down into the valley. "She went that way."

"That's valuable information," he said. Then he withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to shield his fingers as he fished something out of the dirt: a human spinal column with blood-stained bits of flesh still clinging to it.

I didn't count myself as a particularly squeamish person, especially not after what I'd seen with the Slaughterhouse Nine, but I hadn't been expecting _that_. My stomach lurched.

"This man does not appear to have been smothered," the Number Man observed with the same calm he'd showed when I'd paraded an assortment of the world's largest and deadliest arachnids past him.

I swallowed, hard. "Maybe someone killed him in front of her and that's what caused her trigger," I suggested.

"I doubt it," he said. "For one thing, there aren't many ways one human can inflict this particular injury on another. For another, it doesn't fit the powerset we seem to be dealing with. Are you familiar with the idea that mental stress gives rise to mental powers, while physical stress gives rise to physical powers?"

"Sort of," I said. "It's one of the things Tattletale is working on. Finding out where powers come from, how they work."

"Our research indicates it can be broken down even further, depending on the kind of mental stress. You felt isolated and gained a master power. I couldn't understand something and gained a thinker power."

"And?" I said, maybe a touch testily. He was so matter of fact about it, I could almost forgive him for mentioning a low point at a time I was already emotionally raw.

"I suspect this woman felt her surroundings themselves were a threat. I don't see evidence of a separate natural disaster, so perhaps people she trusted were acting threatening, or friendly people revealed themselves to be threats."

He stood up and looked around, paying particular attention to the rift I had pointed to as her most likely route.

"I think she felt alone and threatened," he went on. "I suspect she has a degree of control over the monsters she calls forth and that one of those beings killed him. Door, incinerator." A portal opened and he tossed both vertebrae and handkerchief through. At a "thank you," it closed.

"How flexible are the doors?" I asked. "I'm wondering if we can use them to simplify things, here. Door just behind her, maybe, and knock her out so we don't have to fight her."

"Sometimes Contessa does," he said. "It's harder for the rest of us to use them mid-battle, and I think giving me this rifle was a hint that we shouldn't try it today. Shall we go?"

I added _why not?_ and _why is Contessa the exception?_ to my list of questions and started to make my way down the hill. I used my bugs to locate points on the dirt with firmer footing, and the Number Man seemed to be doing something similar with his power.

As we passed the wreckage of a white van sticking out of one mound of dirt, I placed mosquitoes on the Number Man's back, shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and ankles.

He noticed immediately. "Is that necessary?" he asked. He sounded pained.

"They help me keep track of where you are and what you're doing," I said. "And if we get separated and you say something, I can hear you through them. I can take them off, but it would make things a little harder on me. They won't bite."

"Very well," he said. He exhaled a little more forcefully than normal breathing would have called for—not enough to really qualify as a sigh, but enough for me to register his displeasure. I wouldn't have noticed it if it hadn't been for the two mosquitoes on his chest.

"You aren't a Cauldron cape?" I asked. Maybe it was the wrong call to bring up his trigger event just after I'd irritated him, but I was curious. If he was a natural trigger and had gotten into their inner circle, I could as well.

He didn't seem to be bothered. "Contessa recruited me in 1987—rescued me from the Slaughterhouse Nine, in fact."

"I thought Cauldron _supported_ the Slaughterhouse Nine," I said, thinking of all the people who hadn't been saved in Brockton Bay alone. All the people I hadn't gotten to in Shatterbird's radius, the people in my territory Mannequin and Burnscar had killed to punish me for fighting back, the people who had killed each other during the spread of the agnosia. Glory Girl and Battery, Parian's family. _Brian._ "What with how you give them capes, really strong capes, and haven't stopped them from ending the world. I'm surprised you weren't left to die."

"I would say that some capes created by Cauldron end up in the Nine, not that we go out of our way to provide them capes like we do the Protectorate. I believe Manton sought out Jack specifically to protect himself from us, but I'm not confident in saying he still had the presence of mind to reason that out."

"Tattletale thought the feral killer thing was an act," I said, watching him out of the corner of my eye. How Manton fit in with Cauldron was one of the mysteries I wanted to solve. "He could figure out how to get to Jack and Bonesaw in time to save them from the PRT's bombing. If he's crazy it's not in a way that stops him from eating people."

His lips compressed at that. "I'm sorry to hear that's the case," he said.

"So maybe you could say that monsters will be monsters and be drawn to each other. I'll grant you that if the Slaughterhouse Nine is out there, monsters who get vials from Cauldron will find them and join them. I don't really buy that, but I'll accept that for the sake of argument. What about Gray Boy? He was part of the original Nine and Eidolon's clone said he was yours. A founding member."

"He was," the Number Man said. "So was Nyx. Both were early mistakes."

"I don't think you can write Grey Boy off as a simple mistake," I retorted. "Powers make it so there are plenty of fates worth than death out there, but what he did is just—"

"I know what Grey Boy did," he said. He didn't shout or alter his tone, but his voice cut through my words the way Jack's knife had cut through my mask in Arcadia.

We continued down the mountainside in silence for a few minutes. Was his remark a sign of conscience? Nobody in Cauldron really seemed the type to feel remorse about their actions, but I didn't know him that well. Or maybe it was something more personal. He said he'd been recruited in 1987, which meant that there was a decent chance Contessa had saved him from Grey Boy. I'd probably gotten too close to an old wound.

And, honestly? I didn't feel that bad. He'd opened himself up to being attacked about Cauldron's decisions when he'd joined them. The casual way he'd thrown part of a dead man's body out and the coldness he was showing now made him fair game in my books.

"You wanted to know what Jack did when he heard about Dinah's prophecy," I said. "He was excited. He bragged about how he was going to be a villain in a destruction myth."

"I can see that. He revels in chaos and conflict."

"Think about it. Everything he did in Brockton Bay, everything he would have done to you, if Cauldron hadn't thought you were valuable? He wants to bring that to the whole world," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"And you won't stop him."

"No."

"And you won't tell me why."

"I will," he said.

I'd been focused on finding my path forward, but at those words I stopped dead and snapped my head around to look at him.

"That is to say, I'll have you run the calculations for yourself, and we'll see what conclusions you draw."

"When will that be?"

"When you can do the math," he said. "Which will most likely be at some point after you stop deleting your problem sets."

I felt my mouth drop open in shock. "Are you f—"

And that's when my bugs sensed something, the Number Man leapt, and seedpods filled with fangs burst from the ground.

The bastard had probably timed that.


	27. Reconnaissance in Force 3

**Reconnaissance in Force 5.3**

I jumped back, simultaneously lashing out at the nearest plant with my machete. Between the blade and the warning my bugs had given me half a second before the plants' emergence, I was able to save myself from being snapped to pieces.

"Looks like her power can keep working after the rifts are sealed and she's left the area," I said, trying to act nonchalant.

"Agreed," replied the Number Man. "Unless she _is_ nearby and has eluded our methods of detection."

I doubted that was the case since everything in my range indicated the area had been _abandoned_ , but I didn't say so. It was good that he wasn't making assumptions and even better that he was reminding me of the possibilities.

Besides, defending myself was taking most of my effort. I had to be more careful than I was used to. Without my costume, I was vulnerable, possibly even more vulnerable than I had been while I was under the effects of Scapegoat's power. At least then I had been able to fly.

I realized that I'd gotten accustomed to having easy transportation—either the giant dogs, who let me plow through obstacles, or Atlas, who let me soar over them. I'd have welcomed the sight of Bitch and Bastard at this point, and not just because I missed her.

As I barely managed to dodge another jab, I realized that it wasn't only that I was missing something I was used to; I was also out of practice. I hadn't fought in close quarters since I'd had to contend with Echidna's clones, now seven weeks ago, and even then I'd been facing opponents who looked and moved like humans. The fanged pods attacking me now moved using vines in a way that reminded me of striking snakes, and it was difficult to predict them.

By contrast, I could feel the Number Man moving effortlessly, practically dancing between and around the plants he was fighting. He was much more at ease in this environment than I was, and I found myself feeling a little jealous of the fact his power gave him the ability to attack unimpeded while keeping himself out of harm's way.

Still, I could achieve a similar result with my own powers. I stopped relying on my eyes and surrounded myself with a host of bugs. Even though I could barely see through the swarm, my power gave me situational awareness and a measure of predictive capability. It also obscured the plants' "view" of me, and they started lashing out at my swarm instead of attacking me. I experimented a little and found that the plants didn't care what shape my decoys took, only that they moved.

"They respond to motion," I said through my swarm. "Want me to cover you?"

"It would make things more difficult for me if you did," he said. He extended his machete and spun in a semi-circle, neatly separating eight pods from their stems. "But thank you for the offer."

I took that to mean he needed to be able to see clearly in order for his power to work. What was it, anyway? "Numbers" was an extremely broad category, now that I thought about it. A sight-based understanding of math? I should have asked before we'd gotten into this mess.

Now that my decoys preoccupied the plants, I could choose my place and time to attack. I got behind one of them and swung my machete, clearing bugs out of the way of the strike as I moved. I split the back of the pod and it collapsed to the ground. The pod yawned open and a handful of seeds spilled out.

Satisfied it was dead, I started to hew away at another, which had a casing that proved to be more difficult to split than the first. I was on the third or fourth swing when bugs across the area indicated that more were emerging, growing from the dead ones' seeds.

I glanced back at the seeds from the one I'd destroyed and saw they were sprouting as well.

By the time I realized we had a problem, we'd killed nearly two dozen.

I swore and ran for the periphery. "Killing them makes them multiply," I said.

He did the not-quite-a-sigh thing again. "Naturally," he replied. "I would appreciate some concealment while I think about how to counter this."

I absently surrounded him with a screen of flying insects while I considered possible solutions. "Why do they even want to eat?" I asked. "It's not like they need meat to reproduce."

"At a guess, they aren't a real species. The agent is drawing on her perception of monsters to modify something that exists on another world, or perhaps creating something entirely."

"I'm going to try something," I said. I pulled a few Darwin's bark spiders and ordered them to the nearest pod. I wound silk around it, wiring its "jaws" shut. Then I added a few layers. The cocooned pod spasmed, but failed to open and didn't spew new seeds everywhere.

"I've got a way to stop them from spawning," I said. "But it's going to take a lot of time and use up my best spiders." I'd have to add a few pre-made nets as well as silk ropes to my new utility compartment, once I got it made.

"I suppose we could press on," he said. "But that line of thinking assumes stopping the master will stop the minions, and these are demonstrably independent and self-replicating."

I wondered how bugs would deal with predatory plants in nature. I hadn't done enough research to give me an idea of how, say, flies reacted to venus fly traps, other than to avoid them or be killed by them. As a rule, plants did not eat bugs, bugs ate plants.

In fact, it was one of the things that bugs were most known to do.

"I'm going to see if I can have my bugs eat the seeds," I said. "Not sure how long it will take."

"Excellent idea," he said. "If you concentrate your efforts in an area I can see, I can calculate the time necessary to consume them all."

The answer proved to be a little over thirteen minutes, and I spent each one of the seconds conscious that the cape we were looking for was getting further and further away.

"Locusts," the Number Man said as the bugs finally finished their meal and rose into the air at my direction. "A Biblical plague come to life."

 _Okay_ , I thought. I didn't understand why he put it in those terms. I'd mostly used beetles and not grasshoppers, or whatever locusts were. "I guess," I said, walking ahead. Was he a religious man? It seemed unlikely, hard to reconcile with what I knew of Cauldron. I took care not to walk directly on top of the sealed rifts anymore in case something else came out of the ground. It was a reason to remain silent, but not a good enough one to avoid an awkward silence.

"My apologies," he said. "I had an unusual upbringing. It gave me a substantial philosophical background, and I occasionally still think in those terms. Especially when I use my power in combat."

"Oh," I said. We walked in silence for a while. It somehow felt like I should volunteer something about myself in turn. "Sorry," I said. "I'm not really much of a conversationalist."

"In general, or only among strangers?"

"In general," I said. We stopped as we came to the edge of a cliff, one side of a canyon that was about two blocks across if I had to estimate using my power. "I think I did a pretty good job of communicating while I was with the Undersiders, but when it came to hanging out, it was harder. Same for fighting. I can get my ideas across, but I definitely can't do the banter."

He raised an eyebrow. "Banter?"

"Yeah, like the one-liners, the references, the puns. You know, if we were getting ready to go somewhere and I said something stupid like 'time to bug out,' or . . . something. I don't know."

"Ah," he said. "Jokes."

He abruptly came to a stop and started staring intently at something. I followed his gaze across the canyon and saw he was focused on a pile of dirt.

"What's up?" I asked. I thought it was a little annoying I had to ask, but I supposed he was used to working alone.

"The contours of that embankment on the other side of the valley are inconsistent with the trails we've seen so far. I think that means trouble." He turned to me. "Do you have any insight on what lies beneath?"

"I have fewer bugs there than in other places," I said. "I figured it was because the movement had smothered them."

He studied it for another half minute or so.

"Let's see what happens," he said, and emptied the remainder of his magazine into the area he'd identified.

The response, her response, was instantaneous. The mound that the Number Man had shot erupted outwards, shooting a geyser of earth into the air and showering dirt over everything—including my bugs, about ten percent of which died instantly.

The amount of earth dislodged wasn't small, either, which meant that there was enough to form a bridge across the gorge.

A bridge that the minions she'd been summoning or creating wholesale could now use to reach us.

She wasn't limited to plants. I could pick out hulking, snarling deer, weasels bristling with bloody spikes instead of fur, and bony dogs I only recognized as such because exposure to Rachel's power had given me some experience reading canine body language. To make matters worse, there were some airborne creatures I assumed were based off of birds that smashed through my swarm, killing dozens of my larger beetles on impact.

I probably would have been more horrified or at least shocked by their appearance if I hadn't been exposed to Bonesaw's "art," Cauldron's monstrous capes, or even Echidna's more malformed clones. They were still unsettling, but I attributed that to the fact they were attacking us.

The Number Man started picking them off in order of how close they were to us. "At least we have their attention," he said, in between shots. He backed up slightly, getting closer to me as he continued to fire.

I took that to mean that he wanted me to take over defending his immediate vicinity. "Can you detect her now?" he asked.

"No, but I'll let you know when that changes," I replied. I didn't think I should waste my bullets, so I used my power to slow the creatures' movement by creating silk tripwires to forestall their progress across the bridge and knock them into the gorge below.

When they proved to be so numerous even that didn't slow them down, I tied the ones in front together, which not only tripped them but also forced them to serve as a barrier to their comrades' progress. The Number Man's strategy shifted in response to mine, and he started shooting to pin the larger ones in place so I would have time to tie them down.

He could perceive what my bugs were doing, which was both unusual and _useful_.

I started to explore the crater her response to the Number Man's fire had left, and I found her hiding just inside one of the crevices to another world. As my bugs settled on her, I felt another tear in earth around her, and my power identified something come through, something big. Eight more followed.

I shouted.

"What is it?"

"I found her," I said, "but I don't want to stop her just yet."

"Why?"

"Look," I said, pointing at the host of watermelon-sized hornets that was making its way toward us at my direction. "She's creating things I can use. I think her power is taking inspiration from what I'm showing her. Don't shoot at any of the bugs."

I directed several beetles carrying spiders in her direction, hoping to inspire her to create large flying bugs capable of producing spider silk, while the Number Man continued to kill the monsters as rapidly as they appeared.

Either she or her power realized that her minions weren't being effective, and she started manipulating the ground we were standing on, trying to force us to slip. We were further hampered as vines sprouted from the earth and attempted to catch our feet. Not wanting to risk a repeat of the incident with the seedpods, I immediately started using my ground-dwelling bugs to start eating them.

At last she rewarded my efforts and summoned a monster that was a cross between a dragonfly and a spider. Four-winged and eight-legged, and large enough to produce silk threads half as thick as one of my fingers was round. They started divebombing the spider-carrying beetles I had in the area.

I couldn't wait any longer in the hope that she would produce more bugs, so I took control of the spider-dragonfly hybrids she'd just created and used them to subdue and capture her.

"Got her," I said, using the combined strength of the dozen hybrids and their silk to haul her up out of the hole she'd been hiding in. "There."

I then realized there was a flaw in our plan: we had no way of communicating with her.

"Do you speak Chinese?" I asked.

The Number Man didn't reply. Instead, he raised his weapon and fired three times.

Even at this distance, I could see the blood seep through the webbing I'd wrapped around her.

I turned to the Number Man, who seemed unconcerned until he saw the look on my face. "What is it?" he asked.

The earth beneath our feet fell away.


	28. Reconnaissance in Force 4

**Reconnaissance in Force 5.4**

The sheer number of instructions I was sending out made it seem like I was falling in slow motion. I called on my spiders, both the ones I'd brought with me and the flying ones the murdered girl had made. I had a notion of using the silk to slow me down or help me grab onto the side of the rift, but they weren't fast enough and the dirt was too loose and soft.

I knew that I would never be able to lift myself up with my bugs, so I also directed tens of thousands of the more useless ones below us in the futile hope that they would cushion the fall.

It didn't matter. It wouldn't be enough.

I did it anyway, for the same reason my hands scrabbled at the silt: helpless reflex. There had to be _something_ —

The Number Man caught my wrist, halting my fall at the cost of wrenching my shoulder, the same one that Flechette had injured. I grit my teeth to stop myself from crying out.

I looked up and saw his left hand was wrapped around one of the vines I hadn't had time to destroy. "Door, please," he said.

No door opened. His glasses slipped down his nose, bounced off my forehead, and fell into the abyss below us.

He sighed once more, and this one more was pronounced than the previous two. "I'm going to have _words_ with Contessa," he said.

I diverted a few spiders to help secure his grip on both the vine and me. He was probably strong enough to hold us for the next several minutes, but I didn't want to leave my survival in his hands alone.

"Though I admit," he added as we dangled, "it's quite possible she foresaw that I would be annoyed with her and set this in motion as preemptive retaliation."

"What the hell is wrong with you people?" I shouted at him. My swarm echoed the question.

He looked down at me. From what I could make out of his expression, he seemed puzzled—though maybe he was only squinting because he'd lost his glasses. "I suppose causality does lose meaning when precognition is involved, but I wouldn't characterize it as something _wrong_."

"Are you pretending you don't know what I mean, or are you just stupid?" I wasn't talking about his thinker rivalry, nor did I care. "Where the hell do you get off on killing prisoners? Why the _fuck_ would you do something like that without talking about it before?"

He blinked. "This is not a good time to argue. We should focus on escaping."

"Multitasking is a strength of mine," I snapped, even as I directed my bugs on the surface to locate an anchor point for the silk ropes I intended to weave us. It was harder than I thought it would be; there weren't even any _trees_ by this point, let alone buildings.

"It's not one of mine," he replied. His voice sounded strained.

I sensed weakness. "Really? Because it seems to me you assholes are pretty good at keeping secrets, telling lies, and manipulating people all at once."

"Could you _please_ refrain from tying my hands?" he asked, shamelessly oblivious to the irony of him asking that when all Cauldron had done was tie _my_ hands. "I need them free in order to get us back up."

"Spider silk is stronger than you are," I told him, as I settled on using two of the larger monster corpses, ones reminiscent of water buffalo, to hold my ropes. "Just give me a few minutes to make enough silk to get us out of here. I'll even tell you about Jack while we wait."

He didn't say anything. I noticed he was squinting up at my flying spiders.

"You nearsighted?" I asked. "Does that affect your power?"

"Not particularly," he said. Despite his words, he was still straining to look at the progress I was making, so I sent some of my bugs to go see if they could find his glasses. "I have additional means of perception, and I can use that to extrapolate what I can't see from what I can."

"Okay. I think you should know more about how Jack found out about Dinah's prophecy," I said. "I thought he was Grue at the time because I had agnosia. I was walking with him and noticed that we were being followed by someone. It was Battery, a Protectorate heroine, but he and Bonesaw tried to make me think she was with the Nine. He couldn't manipulate me into killing her, but I did use my spiders to tie her up. Do you get my point?"

"Yes."

His tone indicated he was annoyed.

Good.

"She had the power to outrun Bonesaw's tech," I continued. "But she was delayed and confused because of me. I deliberately baited her with swarm clones to slow her down, and Bonesaw's spiders caught up with her and killed her. Her partner blamed me for her death. I disagree, but I can see his point."

"The parallel you're attempting to draw is too hamfisted to miss," he said. "But I confess I'm having difficulty understanding what you thought we were here to do, why I brought this rifle, if not eliminate the threat."

"There are _plenty_ of ways to get people to stop being a threat without _killing them_ ," I said, not addressing his point about the gun. Yes, I'd noticed it, but I'd assumed it was for the monsters. And I'd been _right_ ; he hadn't come anywhere close to firing all the bullets Contessa had given him. "It's not that hard, either."

"Are you certain you're angry because I killed her? I know you think—"

"Fuck!" I said, responding to what my bugs were sensing rather than whatever was saying. The same thing that had happened with the plants was happening with the animals: more were emerging from the remains of the ones we'd already killed.

He stopped short at the interruption. "Yes?" he said after a moment.

"Not you," I said. "You know how killing the plants made more plants? Same thing with the animals. The teeth are seeds, basically." I couldn't _see_ the process, but I could get the gist of it, use my bugs track the transformation from pebble-sized teeth to fully fledged adults. It took them less than a minute.

"Now would be an appropriate time to mention Thebes," he remarked. "I know Kadmos isn't feminine, but I think the name fits our foe anyway."

I ignored his digression. "How many of them did you kill? Not counting the innocent child you manipulated me into helping you butcher, I mean."

"Thirty-eight," he replied. I added that to the six or seven I'd caused to fall into the gorge. "Are they all replicating?"

"Yeah, about a dozen each," I said. We would have our work cut out for us when we got back to the top, assuming none of the emergent monsters noticed the webs and thought to cut them.

For the time being, they seemed content to attack each other. I was grateful for the opportunity to finish making my escape line, but their tendency to fight amongst themselves wouldn't necessarily help in the long run; if their attacks proved lethal, they'd only end up making more of themselves. I passed the observation on to the Number Man.

"Your new hornets and dragonflies," he said. "Can they reproduce?"

"They're fertile," I said. "Or at least they have everything normal bugs would need."

"Interesting," he said. "Yet I would be willing to place money that if you crushed them, they'd find another way to spawn. Do you see the pattern?"

It was obvious, wasn't it? "Yeah," I grunted, using my free hand to grab hold of the rope my flying spiders brought down to me. It wasn't thick, maybe an inch around, but it was strong enough to hold my weight—our weight. "It's similar to the problem with Echidna—too many destructive enemies created too quickly."

He waited patiently as my beetles bit through the web I'd put on his hands so they could be free again. "I suppose we will have to hunt down the rest of her creations. Kill them, even. Unless you object?"

"They aren't human," I said. His tone didn't sit well with me. It was sardonic, like he thought my "objections" were unreasonable or funny. "And you talked to me. So, no, I don't object."

He nodded, and the mixed look of irritation and confusion he had been wearing since I'd first shouted dissipated. "I see now," he said. He turned away from me and climbed up the rope, not bothering to use his feet.

I wasn't so strong or agile, so I had to rely on the cliff and more ropes to help me up. "What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.

"You're upset because you wanted to make the decision."

He reached a hand over the side to help me up. "That is _not_ why I have a problem with being manipulated into committing cold-blooded murder," I snapped.

"I recommend against lying to yourself," he said.

He was so matter of fact about it that I was momentarily robbed of a reply, and I searched his face for condescension or mockery. He was merely dusting himself off.

When he finished, he continued. "It's an understandable impulse, but it leaves you open to manipulation by people who see more clearly."

"You mean Alexandria." The bugs I'd dispatched to find his glasses finally returned them to me. "Here," I said, when he didn't immediately notice them holding them out.

"Thank you," he said. He took time to polish them on his shirt before continuing. "I've noticed you're very _aware_ of certain things—your goals, your capabilities, your assets, your surroundings. But there are other things you overlook, and in the process you've cultivated weaknesses. Your capacity for self-deception is perhaps the worst."

"I don't think that's a fair assessment," I said, trying to hide how much the comment stung. "I like to think I'm very _aware_ of what I'm thinking. It's how I work, and I think it's one of my strengths."

It was how I _had_ to work. I'd spent two years becoming keenly aware of everything about myself, even and especially things I didn't like about myself—considering how often I'd had every fault of mine, real or imagined, shoved into my face multiple times every day. I'd had to determine how far I could be pushed, had to develop coping mechanisms that worked for me, and then I'd been forced to carry that over into cape life because I'd gotten a fairly weak power.

He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. He focused instead on shooting monsters, aiming so that they fell with shattered teeth. I worked a more non-lethal tactic, using hornets to sting eyes and silk to trip and bind them while I tried to brainstorm a way of destroying them completely.

"If I'm being honest," I continued, "it's _harder_ to play to that strength here because of the spot you guys have put me in."

"Explain?"

"I'm used to working with Tattletale, to having access to all the knowledge my team has access to and then some. And it's not just that I'm being forced to adjust to work in the dark," I said. "Though yes, that's true, and, yes, it's pissing me the _fuck_ off. But part of the reason Tattletale and I worked so well together was that we trusted each other. You guys aren't extending me any of that trust, and I don't really think I should extend my trust to you. It's throwing a wrench into my ability to plan and work."

"You might be expecting too much too quickly," he said. "There are things I don't know and I've been here since the early years."

We'd cleared our immediate vicinity, so I directed him to the place with the next highest concentration of monsters. "How can you live with that?" I asked him between shots. "Everything you do, it just feels— _off_. Like you're coming at this entire situation, how an organization and team _should_ work, from completely the wrong angle. _Backwards_."

"We know our hawks from our handsaws."

"See, I have no idea what that means. But," I said, cutting off the reply he started to make, "I know it's probably something like 'oh, we definitely know what we're doing, we promise.' And, _again_ , I have no way of knowing if that's true and there's no reason I should trust what anyone here says."

"I see," he said, and that was all. No outpouring of confidence or even acknowledgment of my situation.

Well, I hadn't really thought that would _work_.

I was still a little disappointed in him.

My bugs alerted me to the presence of a snake about to attack. I brought my pistol up and fired, shooting it in the mouth like I'd seen him do. "How hot is that incinerator of yours?" I asked.

He pursed his lips, briefly considering the question. "Hot enough," he replied. "We'll see if I can get a door to it—"

The door opened.

He muttered something under his breath, but I didn't catch it. It didn't sound like English.

I ignored it and set about shoving, tossing, and rolling monsters into the furnace. I used my silk and he used doors to make things easier on us, but it still took a good twenty minutes to clear the area.

"Three things," he said, when we were done. "The first is that there _wasn't_ an alternative to killing her. Contessa said as much."

"I was there, and I didn't notice her saying 'oh, by the way, you have to go kill someone in cold blood.'"

"She handed me a loaded rifle and said that our target's power made containment impossible. She wouldn't have destroyed a resource like a cape that could make a self-replicating army if there were an alternative."

"I don't have any way of verifying that," I said. "I mean, if you'd tell me what her power is—"

"The second thing," he said, overriding what I was saying, "is that I should have accounted for your ignorance and explained things, and I apologize for not doing that."

I opened my mouth, but shut it when I found I didn't have an immediate response. It was the first time anyone in Cauldron had apologized for _anything_ they'd done, whether it was causing me to have a mental breakdown or setting me up to fail on my first mission, and it threw me off my stride.

I couldn't deny it was _nice_ to hear.

"I think our business here is concluded," he said, but he was frowning down at his rifle.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I have two shots left," he said. "I don't know if we missed something, or if Contessa's atrocious sense of humor is showing."

"I'm not sensing anything else," I said. The thought that _I_ might be the intended target suddenly crossed my mind, and I tensed, waiting to see if he'd act, wishing I'd been able to complete my costume in time.

The moment passed. He shrugged and asked again for a door; this time it opened, and we stepped back into the armory. He wiped down his machete and put it back where we got it, and I followed suit.

"What was the last thing?" I asked.

He looked up from where he was disassembling the rifle. "Pardon?"

"You said you had three things to say to me," I said. "One was background, another was an apology. What was the third?"

"Ah, yes. You mentioned you had difficulty devising witticisms during combat," he said.

"I guess. So?"

"You told me to wait a couple of minutes, but you should have said _hang on_."

I stared at him, wondering how I'd managed to get into this conversation.

He was staring back at me, clearly expecting a reaction.

"I get it," I said, mostly because I couldn't find a way to change the topic or ignore him. "Because you were hanging onto the side of the cliff."

He looked so absurdly pleased with himself that I had to laugh.


	29. Reconnaissance in Force 5

**Reconnaissance in Force 5.5**

I consolidated and organized my bugs while I watched the Number Man finish cleaning his rifle. Most of the swarm I'd collected earlier that day had been crushed or suffocated, but there were still a little over eighteen hundred of them from forty-three different species left.

That wasn't a big number, not where bugs were concerned, but the ones that could handle the climate in China would breed, and so would their offspring. I doubted that particular area would recover any time soon, but I wasn't going to add to the ecological damage by leaving non-native arthropod species to wander around unchecked.

And they'd be useful to me.

"Hey," I said.

He looked up from the spring he was wiping down. "Yes?"

"Can you get me a door to my place? I need to store these, and I think the Custodian would appreciate if I moved them soon."

"Go ahead," he said, and that was enough for a portal to open to my workshop. I stepped through and directed my new acquisitions to follow one species at a time. Once I secured them inside terrariums, I directed them to mate.

This forced me to consider an entirely new set of problems. I was used to collecting and using bugs that naturally inhabited a given area, where everything they needed was available and they could take care of themselves when I wasn't around. I wasn't used to breeding exotic species in captivity, and even a cursory review of the facts indicated the logistics would be daunting.

I had to find a way to feed them all and their offspring. Spiders were among my most important tools, and managing them was _simple_ ; they just ate other bugs. So did wasps, although many of the new ones slightly complicated the matter by being parasitoidal. I'd need to get them access to the other species they needed to lay their eggs in.

Most beetles weren't carnivores, so I'd have to find them the plants and fungi they did eat. The ironclad beetles in particular were my priority; I wanted lots of them quickly so I could make my armor. If I remembered my research right, ironclad beetles needed lichen to survive.

I wasn't sure what that meant. Would they eat just any lichen, or would I have to collect it from Texas ( _a_ Texas, rather) myself? I could ask Wrath what the local options were; he'd probably appreciate me coming to him for advice, assuming he wouldn't see it as weakness or an attack on the natural ecosystem of Earth #1054.

Or maybe I could order a lot, assuming there was enough of a demand for lichen that ordering it in bulk made for a viable business. Try as I might, I couldn't imagine any circumstances under which the average civilian would have an actual _use_ for lichen. Maybe I would have to hire someone on another earth to collect it for me.

The last bugs I brought were the giant hornets and winged spiders I'd collected. The Number Man hadn't insisted on killing them, and I decided that meant I was allowed to make more. I'd still use the Darwin's bark spiders for costumes, but there were other things I could do now, things that would be _easier_. Producing silk rope instead of silk threads, using the fact they could _fly_ and carry other bugs with them, and half a dozen other possibilities raced through my head.

The hornets were less obviously versatile, but I still had ideas for them. Their stingers were big enough they might be useful against lower-level brutes or people with heavier clothes—and I could appreciate the intimidation factor inherent in plate-sized wasps whose only response to dying was to turn into more plate-sized wasps.

There was one problem. I'd seen how aggressive every other one of her creations was, and I'd seen that aggression extend to others of their kind when there was no better target. It wasn't too far of a stretch to suppose that the bugs would act the same way once I wasn't controlling them anymore, so I ended up putting each in its own terrarium.

I was going to need more terrariums. A _lot_ more.

I'd start there. I turned to get my laptop and collided with the Number Man.

He'd been standing right behind me—for how long? I hadn't noticed him come in.

I suppressed the instinct to apologize. He'd snuck up on me in my own room; he could afford to be walked into. "What do you want?" I asked.

"You're not staying for breakfast?"

I was about to refuse, but I decided to test an idea I'd had before. "Give me a minute?" I asked. "I need to check on my teammates."

My absence hadn't affected my team, most of whom were still asleep. Mercurial and Reset were the only ones awake, and they were watching television in the company of the dhole pup. The rest of them were in bed save Prominence, who was laid out on the floor of his workshop and snoring loudly enough my bugs could hear. I suspected he'd wake up with a backache.

I made a show of dismissing the bugs that didn't belong in one of the terrariums before nodding to the Number Man. I followed him, tentatively sending a handful of gnats into Cauldron's headquarters to scout ahead. The Custodian killed them immediately.

When I followed them in, she brushed against my left hand three, four, _five_ times.

"Sorry," I said. "I'm trying to keep my bearings, not cause you trouble."

Her only response was to touch my left hand again. Annoyance? Reprimand? A warning?

I allowed my shoulders to slump a little. "I get it," I said.

That seemed to satisfy her.

It also satisfied me. She _hadn't_ crushed any of the spiders I'd hidden on myself—not the one on the small of my back, or the one on my shin beneath my jeans, or the one in my armpit.

It wasn't an _answer_ to the question of how to neutralize Cauldron's security measures, not really. It wasn't as though I could do very much with three spiders I had to keep immobile.

But it did give me back a measure of control, however small. I felt more like myself, and I suppressed a smile as I followed the Number Man into the kitchen where we'd started the morning.

He went for a cutting board and knife block. "Can you cook?" he asked.

"A bit," I said, watching him cut into an onion. I'd had to learn after my mom had gone. "Nothing fancy."

"I thought scrambled eggs and oatmeal would be adequate after expending so many calories," he said.

 _Dork_ , I thought. I started poking around in the drawers and cabinets.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

"Measuring cup for the milk?" I suggested.

"No need," he said. "There's a grater in the third drawer from your left. Cheese is in the refrigerator, second shelf."

I looked where he said, and I did find cheese wrapped in unlabeled white paper. It was cheddar—white cheddar, of course. I rolled my eyes. _Somebody_ in this outfit had to be afraid of color. The Doctor, maybe?

Beside me, the Number Man swept the onion skin and root off the counter, and the Custodian destroyed them before they could hit the ground.

"Like this," he said, reaching over and rearranging the placement of my fingertips on the cheese. "Increases your control, reduces the chance you'll cut yourself."

It _was_ easier, I noticed.

I suddenly felt . . . lost. Empty. Maybe it was coming down off the adrenaline. Maybe it was standing here, being forced to do something mundane without being able to use my power. Maybe it was the emotions conjured by cooking with someone else the way I used to cook with my dad. Whatever it was, I was feeling less sure of myself than I had during the fight I'd just finished.

"Something's on your mind," he said. He'd finished dicing tomatoes and was in the process of mixing eggs and milk—no measuring cups, as he'd said.

"Whiplash," I said. "I don't know what's supposed to be happening anymore. I'm just standing here making _eggs_ when I—The world's going to end, I'm completely cut off from everything I grew up with and worked for, I'm having to do meaningless tasks with people who are some kind of cross between children and slaves, I've killed two people, and—"

"Two people?" he asked.

"Directly," I said. I _had_ tied someone down so she could be shot, lured Butcher into a trap, lied to Sundancer about the capes still inside Noelle, killed several of Noelle's clones, and deliberately left someone to die. Between them, the people I hadn't saved from Mannequin, and anyone who might have died when Shatterbird escaped during Noelle's rampage, the list of people whose deaths I bore responsibility for was . . . not short enough.

He poured the egg mixture into a skillet. "May I ask whether James Tagg is one of those two?"

"Yeah," I said. I couldn't think of anyone else who would count as having been "directly" killed by me—the Butcher? "Why?"

"If you poured gasoline all over a man and dropped a lit match, would you blame the match when he died?"

I frowned. "Are you telling me to blame Alexandria?"

"'Blame' might have the wrong connotations. It's accurate to say she was in control of your actions in that moment." He paused a moment to add the tomatoes and onions, and the grim sort of non-smile I'd noticed a couple times before briefly showed on his face. "Mostly. Cheese?"

I wordlessly handed him the bowl I'd collected the cheese in. Hearing that she made a mistake didn't make me feel better at all. She'd made a mistake about my _power_ , not me. She had understood me, understood _Taylor_ , and she had used that understanding to control me the way I used my power to control my bugs.

She'd read a few files and extrapolated enough information to break me in a way that would achieve four or five of their goals, all the while without me realizing they were in control. I turned away from him and set out plates, bowls, and cutlery as I tried to sort through what I was thinking.

After a few minutes, the uneasiness I'd been feeling finally crystallized into a coherent thought. "You people could have made this transition _easy_ on me," I said. "But I think you _want_ it to be hard."

"Orange juice," he said, and I returned the refrigerator. I was relieved to see the pitcher that held the juice was clear, not white, and poured us each a glass while he emptied the eggs into a serving bowl. "Integrating you is difficult because of who you are," he said. "You resolved your problems with authority by _becoming_ the authority. You're used to making the decisions, and now you can't."

Was that really what it looked like from the outside? To people who knew my history, but didn't know me?

"I had to," I said, speaking over the sound of the whistling kettle, the same one that he'd used to boil water for tea that morning. "The system was bro—"

"You're right," he interrupted. "We could have tricked you into accepting us as readily as you did Rebecca's ruse. I could have asked her for advice on how to get you to kill our target without protest this morning, or to make you think that continuing your education was _your_ idea instead of ours. Is that what you would like me to do in the future? Check with her to ensure I avoid offending you?"

I did _not_ want him to ask Alexandria for tips on manipulating me, and I could hardly believe that he'd raised the possibility. Was he _trying_ to provoke me? Why couldn't Cauldron find a hobby that wasn't pissing me off?

He turned the kettle off and brought it over to the bowls of oatmeal I'd prepared. "Stop bristling at me," he said mildly.

I tried to think up a comeback, but it was like I was trying to keep my footing on quicksand. I wasn't sure how to categorize him, so I seized on something I _did_ understand: their piss-poor team management. "I think I'd rather you spend your effort on alerting me to things like the fact your test subjects to do stupid things during combat," I said coolly.

"Why didn't you get a briefing when you got to your team?" he asked.

"I didn't get much of anything," I said. "Mostly just files about their powers that require context you won't give me."

He shook his head. "Not from us. You should have someone who knows everything about how the rest work. History on the team dynamics, the basics of what the others do, certain phrases and gestures that can give you control in an emergency—everything that isn't kept in the digital files."

He meant Prominence. "He was busy," I said. "Then he was asleep. I was in a hurry. Like I told Alexandria."

His brow furrowed. I reached for a change of subject.

"How many people have you killed?" I blurted.

"Four hundred sixty-eight, personally," he said. "Three hundred eighty-nine of them were from before I joined Cauldron."

"How does that figure?" I asked. "Does Cauldron have some sort of anti-aging device?"

"No," he said. "I was recruited around my twelfth birthday."

I almost choked on my juice. "You killed hundreds of people before you were _twelve_?"

"I misled you earlier," he said. "I chose a word that, while accurate, gave you the wrong idea. I knew what you would think and let the misconception stand."

"Which word?"

" _Rescue_ ," he said.

He'd used it in context of the Slaughterhouse Nine. "And what word would give me the right idea?"

" _Poach_ ," he said. "King called me Harbinger."

I'd heard the name before, but I couldn't place a face—costume, rather—or powerset to it.

I didn't know what to think about it. On the one hand, it had been a long time ago, he'd obviously been young, someone had probably pressuring him, and he'd taken the opportunity to leave—the same things I used to think about Alec. On the other hand, the Slaughterhouse Nine was the _Slaughterhouse Nine_ , and finding out he'd been part of them made his earlier comments about Gray Boy make more sense and less at the same time.

I set it aside; whatever he'd done, the Number Man possessed personal insight into the man I had to stop. That was an opportunity I couldn't forego, no matter what my feelings were. "You knew Jack?"

"Yes. We were friends. After Nicholas—Gray Boy—died, we killed King together. I wanted to stop, he wanted to go on."

"You, Jack, Gray Boy," I said. "Why were there so many kids?"

"King had particular tastes," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said lamely.

"You wanted secrets," he said. His expression was neutral, blank even for what I'd seen of him so far. "That was one I could share without risking extinction."

I was bad at offering sympathy, and I knew I would be bad at trying to pretend I wasn't _extremely interested_ in what he could tell me about Jack Slash, so I changed the subject again.

"You didn't know we would be going anywhere this morning," I said. "Why did you want to talk to me?"

"I alluded to it before," he replied. "I saw that you deleted your readings and problem sets and wanted to know why. I was surprised to see you cede ground so easily to your enemies."

I blinked. "What?"

"Your enemies interrupted your education. You intend to let that stand?"

"The stakes are too high. The world's ending." I paused. " _Multiple_ worlds are ending. Giving me quizzes is a waste of time."

"The end point is precisely why you should seek out an education," he said. "It's impossible to foresee what will be left once the calamity has passed, but there are _some_ things that will inevitably true. One of those is that humanity will need to rebuild from _nothing_. We need to retain our knowledge somehow."

"By putting it in my head?" I scoffed. "I think I should _train_ , not _study_. They aren't the same."

"True," he said. "You _will_ train while you are with us. I _suggest_ you also expand your mind in more conventional directions, and I will say refusing this would be turning down an opportunity to prove yourself."

I forced myself to eat two, three, four bites of oatmeal. I'd resolved not to let these people make me lose my cool again, and I was now very aware of the possibility he was trying to play me. He'd mentioned my bullies, which was a good indicator he trying to make me feel like refusing him would be capitulating to them.

He also had a point, but maybe not the way he thought. My dad . . . I needed to see him, and it might be a good idea to be able to tell him I was studying again.

"I looked at what was in there," I said. "It's too advanced for where I was when I left."

"The math curriculum is designed to be self-taught," he said. "Answer the initial questions and the program will adjust to your level. It will alert me if you need assistance in a particular area."

"And the readings? I thought they were like something you'd find in college," I said.

"I wouldn't know," he said. "The only person here who technically graduated from college was Rebecca—specifically, Director Costa-Brown—but she had a body double _and_ a powerful thinker ability."

I frowned.

"I think you'll find most of the readings relevant. Some of them focus on concrete things—history, economics, generalship. Others are more abstract excerpts from literature and philosophy. You'll read three or four related articles at a time and analyze them with an essay. Again, the curriculum will automatically adjust to your level."

I nodded. I'd told Alexandria I'd overcome whatever obstacles they set in my way. If one of those obstacles was _homework_ , I could either deal or find a way to get around it.

He'd also said one word that was enough to capture my attention. There was a lot he seemed to be promising or implying about what I'd get if I did pass their stupid tests, and I didn't want to read too much into that or get my hopes up—but that one word spoke to something inside me, something that could be happy with what _I_ got out of this arrangement.

 _Generalship._


	30. Reconnaissance in Force X

**Reconnaissance in Force 5.x**

It stung, seeing how badly maintained the grave was.

The grass surrounding the heavily eroded limestone marker was overgrown and mixed with weeds. No flowers, no sign of additional memorial, no evidence that anyone had been here in months—at least.

Well. It had been twenty-five years. There was little reason to suppose her alternate self's parents were still alive, and even less to suppose they hadn't moved on.

Regardless. Whatever _she_ had become, the child she had once been didn't deserve to be so neglected. She stooped down and used her finger to clear the moss out of the inscription.

 _Rebecca Costa-Brown_. _July 19, 1971 to August 30, 1986._

An engraved outline of an angel accompanied the words, and she cleaned that as well before turning to weeding. Her efforts startled a harvestman, and she couldn't help but flinch as it sk— _scuttled_ away.

A pair of shiny black shoes and immaculately pressed trousers appeared in her peripheral vision.

"I brought you tea," Contessa said.

"I'm busy," Rebecca said.

"Your tea will get cold."

The words weren't spoken with any particular inflection, but they were still a mild rebuke: _don't waste my time_. Contessa didn't have to expend _effort_ doing anything; she sacrificed minutes and seconds to do favors for others, and she expected them to respect that.

Rebecca wasn't really in the mood to be guilted into anything. "I needed some time to think," she said.

"You wanted some time to indulge your self-pity."

"I've been off-balance since the fourteenth," Rebecca replied. "I haven't made a mistake or been hurt in some time. I need to think about what went wrong—what I did wrong."

"Take comfort," Contessa said. "If you _had_ died, we would have put up a plaque in the break room. Something small, something tasteful. Something like 'In disappointed memory of Rebecca, generally useful until overcome by a handful of irritated spiders.' The Custodian would have kept it clean."

Rebecca used her ability to fly rather than her muscles to rise to her feet. "Give me the fucking tea and tell me what you want," she said.

Contessa handed over the cup. "If it's a break you're looking for, help me. I need a spotter."

 _That_ was what she'd been interrupted for? "Is Number Man busy?"

"He's gone hunting with Weaver. A-class threat, Guizhou."

Rebecca nodded. It was something she and Number Man had discussed. She would push the girl, provide an enemy and a target for her resistance. Number Man would pull, be a friend and encourage growth in a different direction. If Taylor Hebert solved the problems thrown at her, if she proved capable of _adapting_ and moving past the attitudes and viewpoint her trigger event had engendered, she would get more—including something of what she wanted. If she failed, they would leave her on the periphery of their operations, useful after a fashion but ultimately an unfortunate casualty of her own trauma.

The careful blend of coercion and temptation, tailor-made for the target and designed to yield results regardless of the outcome—it was no exaggeration to say that was how Cauldron operated. The Doctor had even done it to _her_ , not in the beginning but after Hero's death.

It was effective.

Rebecca followed Contessa into one of the many gymnasia scattered throughout their still empty base, leaving her Aleph counterpart behind.

The tea was good, of course, made using snow chrysanthemums—Contessa must have raided Number Man's personal collection—and the ideal temperature. She nursed it while Contessa removed her suit jacket, tie, and dress shirt.

Contessa untucked her t-shirt and pulled her hair back. "While you're in the mood to pointlessly beat your brain, we should to talk about the Endbringers."

Rebecca wrinkled her nose. "Again?"

"Again."

"We've had this discussion repeatedly. We've gotten nowhere, _repeatedly_."

Contessa shrugged and moved to a bench press station. Rebecca followed her, still speaking. "What I said after Madison applies now. Whether the Endbringers were created by one of our capes or because they're carrying out latent programming from the Thinker is impossible to say. We need to _kill them_ , not talk about them."

"Fifteen kilogram plates, please."

Rebecca rolled her eye but complied.

"We've gotten two more clues in the past fortnight," Contessa said once the set was complete. "Tattletale said they're designed, but maybe not directly by the enemy. They're playing a game, but she thinks it's a _human_ game. Panacea thinks the way they've manifested is indicative something went wrong with the invader's lifecycle."

"We know what wrong with the cycle," Alexandria said. On Contessa's signal, she added another kilogram and a quarter to each side of the bar. " _You_ did."

"Yes. This is another indication that one of _ours_ is responsible."

"Do you think so?" she asked.

"The Doctor doesn't think it matters one way or the other."

"I didn't ask about the Doctor."

Contessa furrowed her brow and frowned a little. Annoyance. "You know I'm useless here."

Rebecca helped her through the next set before replying. "The foreign element the Doctor identified is most likely responsible for the control of the Endbringers," she said. "What if you killed all the extreme deviants to eliminate that possibility?"

It took a minute for Contessa to come to a conclusion. "I think not," she said. "There's no guarantee that destroying the designer would render the Endbringers inactive. The sudden loss might even provoke them into escalating. In the end, we would have thrown away a tool for no gain. I think we'll have to weather the attacks until Scion acts. Then we use Doormaker to leave them on whatever remains of Bet."

Contessa hadn't fought the Endbringers, not directly. She hadn't seen Behemoth burn a man from the inside, hadn't sifted through the wreckage of city drowned by Leviathan, or watched Dragon blow up a hero who'd heard too much of the Simurgh's song.

Consequently, she was willing to pay less to kill them. The thought of murdering more than a thousand prisoners on a hunch turned Rebecca's stomach, but she pressed on. "We won't survive Scion if we have another day like Delhi."

"We relied on deviations or extremely strong powers to tell us if we had given someone a vial with the special element. The creator could be someone who _didn't_ deviate and my power would not pick up on it. To be safe I'd have to kill anyone from the early days who had a strong power—including you, Legend, and Eidolon."

She looked up at Rebecca as she said the last word.

Ah. The question Rebecca had been maneuvered here to answer. "You're—you want my opinion on whether not it is Eidolon?"

"You know him better than I do."

Rebecca thought about it. David, her friend and coworker and comrade in every single Endbringer fight. The man powerful enough to be spoken of in the same breath as Scion. The man who might one day save them all—if they got lucky.

"He's one of ours," Contessa said. "He received the special element in his vial. He doesn't understand the particulars of his power, nor does he have control over it. Unlike every other cape we've produced, I'm wholly blind to his power. He's the obvious suspect."

Rebecca shook her head. "They don't act on his knowledge or things he cares about. He didn't know Echidna was in Brockton Bay or that Phir Se's weapon was in Delhi. Sphere's plans, the cape scene in Lausanne, the breakthrough we were about to have before Madison—these were _our_ concern, Cauldron's concern, not his."

"What I saw of the superweapons in my trigger vision made me think they were at least semi-autonomous."

"Setting aside the obvious question of how that would _work_ , it doesn't fit his personality. Fighting them, trying to kill them and saving everyone is who he is. He's sacrificed everything for that, including power that he knows he can't afford to expend."

Contessa put away the remainder of the weights. "Maybe that's what he wants," she said. "To be the hero. And for that, he's willing to make sacrifices. Willing to martyr himself, because that too is heroism."

"That . . ." Rebecca suppressed her doubts and forced herself to seriously consider the possibility. "It sounds like slander, Contessa. I know David. Whatever his faults, he is a good man and he wants to _win_."

"I have to ask. I—" She broke off. Rebecca couldn't fully make out her expression, focused as she was on collecting her clothes. "I have to."

It seemed that Rebecca hadn't been alone in questioning her actions that morning.

"All right," she said. "Let's say that the Endbringers are there for David. What do we do? Kill him? _Tell_ him we think it's true? Try to change him in order to influence them? How?"

"We need him," Contessa said. She sounded hesitant, but her voice got stronger as she continued. "We need him. No matter what, he's our best bet. We need him."

"We do," Rebecca agreed. She felt the change in air pressure that indicated Doormaker had opened a portal behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw she'd been dropped back in her office. She glanced at the wall that still had the equation Number Man had given her for relaxation, again tried to solve it, and again came up empty. "If it helps, I think you're wrong."

"Thanks for working with me."

Rebecca shrugged. She hadn't really had a choice. "Can you stay?"

"Sorry. I told the Doctor I would help her while I sleep."

"Any tips?"

Contessa stood for a moment, drumming the fingers of one hand against her trousers as she thought. "Faultline," she said. "Tomorrow I will arrange for two dozen intermediaries to hire her. Her team will open 'permanent' portals between Bet and other worlds over the coming weeks—enough that Endbringers won't be able to attack them all, enough to reduce the burden placed on the defending forces. Doormaker can seal them once Scion attacks."

"Thank you," Rebecca said. She looked at her office walls and wondered which of her notes would have to go to accommodate the new information and the things she would have to attend to in the coming weeks. She'd likely need the Number Man's input as well to track the flow of trade goods and help her predict likely expansion directions and rates, and spot likely problems in the making. One of them was immediately obvious: spreading people from Bet into other worlds would mean spreading the potential for natural triggers. They—she—would need to provide weak and medium strength capes to stabilize the new communities. Perhaps she could even find _strong_ capes who could be used to replicate some of the results from the Terminus project in the newer worlds.

"You can erase the brain teaser," Contessa said, turning from Rebecca to go to the gym's showers. "It's unsolvable."

"Number Man wouldn't do that," Rebecca said, irritated. "I'm certain I'm just approaching it from the wrong angle."

"I altered it before you had a chance to see it," Contessa said, and the portal closed behind her.

Rebecca reviewed the past week in her mind, trying to work out why she'd been sent on a wild goose chase. When the answer came to her, she was overcome with the desire to hit something. Her body was the only thing in the room that could withstand the blow, so she slammed both of her palms against her face.

Yesterday she'd gotten so wrapped up in trying to solve the problem that she'd been a little late to their meeting, and Contessa had beaten her to the last chocolate-frosted doughnut by about fifteen seconds.

After a moment, she lowered her hands, put Contessa's antics out of mind, and settled down to work.


	31. Turn 1

**Turn 6.1**

I swore.

I immediately regretted it, and the regret stopped me from throwing my screwdriver across the room. I _wanted_ to throw it—at this point, even a small, petty gesture to vent my frustration would make me feel better—but I couldn't afford to further undermine myself.

Instead I stood up from the grate I'd been crouched next to. As I stretched, I threw my focus outwards. I started with the bugs I'd collected with the Number Man two weeks ago, which I'd installed in several dozen terrariums in one of my base's subbasements. So long as I was awake and present, they did nothing but eat, grow, and breed. I estimated I had roughly four months before I would need to expand the base just to house them.

A problem for another day. I moved on to the gnats and mosquitoes I used to monitor my teammates. Mercurial sat at the dining table, bent over a tablet. Reset sat next to her, not doing anything so far as I could tell. The kids were watching television, which was less remarkable than the fact Wrath and Blitzeis were sitting on opposite sides of them in frosty silence. They'd spent a good deal of the morning arguing over whether Wrath's calculation of our latitude and longitude was correct. Teratoma had not so subtly fueled the argument and then retired to her room, where she was reading.

I sighed a little. My first impression of "Strike Team B26" was that the cracks in team cohesion were there, but subtle. I'd since learned they weren't cracks so much as yawning chasms. There wasn't anything to be done about that right now, so I concentrated on the only bugs I'd kept in my room—the thousands of Darwin's bark spiders who were working not only on the silk portion of my costume, which was nearly complete, but also on clothing for those on my team who would most benefit.

Outside, the local arthropod life went about their business. I let them be.

Once I'd centered myself, I lowered my arms, rolled my shoulders, and turned to my audience.

Prominence was perched on the end of one of his work tables, watching me. His chin was resting on his knees, and he was hugging his legs to his chest. If he'd been another person, I'd have thought he was upset or defensive, but that was just one of the things he did. Brian didn't sit like that—not even Alec would have—but he did.

I hadn't meant to show any kind of weakness in front of him, and I didn't want him to realize how much I had riding on this.

"There's a flathead in the toolbox under the sink," he said. He _could_ have prevented me from making the mistake, _could_ have told me I had arrived with the wrong kind of screwdriver the moment I'd come down to his workshop, but he hadn't.

"I know," I replied. "My bugs are getting it."

He shook his head. "Bugs in the kitchen," he said, disgusted. "Again."

"We've been over this," I said, even as a team of beetles, grasshoppers, and spiders pulled the lid off the toolbox. "They're raised in a sterile environment. They don't eat anything you'd think of as particularly dirty. I keep them away from the food."

"The kitchen," he repeated.

"You're overreacting."

He scoffed. "Am I?"

"Yeah," I said. "You are."

There was a pause. I maintained eye contact as I waited for the screwdriver to be brought to me.

"I was in the service," he said.

"You said so," I said.

"Not for long," he said.

"I gathered," I said.

"Long enough to pick out a certain tendency among the weaker subalterns. They were insecure about their rank, paranoid their subordinates weren't respecting them enough. They overcompensated, created a self-fulfilling prophecy that eventually led to them developing a chip on their shoulder. A nightmare to work with."

" _You_ have a chip on your shoulder," I said. "It's causing problems."

"I don't think having fixed ideas about whether vermin should be near food preparation constitutes a chip on the shoulder."

"Not what I'm talking about." The beetles arrived and dropped the screwdriver in my hand, so I turned my back on him as I once again bent over the grate.

"You can't think my choice not to go along with Cauldron's plan for me is _unreasonable_ ," he said. His tone had changed. Earlier he'd sounded a little mocking—it wasn't exactly _nice_ , but it had been something light that wasn't there anymore.

I turned each screw I loosened over to two dragonflies to hold so they wouldn't roll away and get lost amid the chaos of the tinker workshop. "I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you're causing problems."

I popped the grate up. A plastic box lay in the recess underneath. A black cable ran from one end of it to the wall, where I knew it would come out upstairs. A centimeter's length of gray cable came out the other end and abruptly ended, disappearing into a portal that was maybe the diameter of my pinky.

The source of the television signal.

"The others aren't doing well," I continued. "They're bored and discontent. Restless. I don't know enough about them to resolve those problems, to keep the _peace_ in between missions. I think you do, and you're choosing not to."

"Here's a clue," he said. "If you break the television, you'll make them cross."

Personally, I thought we could do without the TV, which had become a point of contention. It was a distraction from the training we _needed_ to be doing, and I was sick of the nearly hourly arguments over who should be allowed to control the remote. "They're already 'cross,'" I replied.

"I imagine that has to do with the fact they're kidnapped, brainwashed, mutated slaves who don't know who they are," he said coldly. "Criticizing _me_ won't fix that."

I thought for a minute as I studied the box. It wasn't giving me the answers I wanted. "You're feeling guilty," I said.

"I question whether a sixteen year old girl can have anything substantial to say about my position," he said.

I pinched the gray cable where it met the portal, which created _just_ enough space between the cable's outer coating and the edge of the portal to allow for the passage of gnats. "I'm trying to understand you," I said, "And I'm telling you what I think so you can tell me if I'm off base before I get to my point."

"I'm all curiosity," he said.

"Most of us go through hell to get powers. You drank some juice."

"I sold everything I had and then some to get that 'juice.'"

"Yeah, which must have made it _worse_ when you found out where it came from," I went on. I let go of the cable once twenty gnats had passed through. "You saw the ugliness behind your fantasy, saw what you were supporting. So you threw yourself into taking care of the victims in front of you, trying to make up for the fact you materially contributed to and benefited from that ugliness—"

He jumped to his feet. "You've said enough," he said.

"But that was just what they wanted," I said. "Which leaves us here."

He took a step forward, probably to attack me. I buzzed him with four of my mutated hornets, which I'd walked to a position behind him while he was watching me struggle with the screwdriver. He didn't just flinch, he actually screamed a little and jumped back, straight into the table he'd been sitting on earlier, and he slid to the ground.

Being a veteran cape and cyborg who didn't flinch at performing daily operations on himself didn't stop him from being _afraid of bugs_.

I pretended not to notice his flailing. It was a little comedic, but I didn't have to add insult to injury by openly laughing. I landed the hornets on myself and focused on what the gnats on the other side of the portal were telling me.

The cable I'd followed connected to a second plastic box, which in turn had three _other_ cables connected to it. Those cables led to portals of their own, portals I couldn't reach.

"I'm not accusing you of anything," I said. "I know what it means, to do something bad even if you didn't _mean_ for it to be bad, and I know it sucks to have to think about that."

He stood up again, brushed himself off. He was still silent, and I used the silence to think about what I was learning. My power obviously worked through portals, so I had to wonder why the only bugs on the other side were the gnats I'd sent there. There were four portals in total, which meant that there were four different bugless locations.

Discouraging.

"I'm not good at being tactful or knowing just what to say," I said. "I'm sorry for making a mess of this. The fact is, the end of the world is coming and that's more important than everything else we have going on. The people here need help. They need some sort of cohesion. They need training."

"No," he said. I looked over my shoulder at him. Short and slight as he was, his anger made him seem even smaller. I read his flushed cheeks as embarrassment, not just anger; he seemed to recognize he couldn't recover his dignity following his little squeak and fall.

Which only him _angrier_.

I could sympathize.

"I'm not going to pretend I can persuade you," I said. "But this is how I see it. Yeah, Cauldron _knew_ you would feel guilty enough you'd feel compelled to help the people here. That doesn't erase the fact you _can_ help, and it doesn't erase the fact you're _hurting_ everyone else here by _not_ helping."

"No," he said again. "There is precious little in this life I can control. I'm it, and I won't contribute to a corrupt system anymore."

"Okay," I said. "If you change your mind, I'm making them do a drill this afternoon. If you joined us, you'd even out the team numbers."

"I won't," he said. "What in hell are you doing with the cable box?"

"Signal comes in," I said. "I'm assuming that means signal can go out."

I was trying to figure out whether I was right about that—and if I was, how I could use it to send a message to Lisa.

"I suppose that's a reasonable assumption, but it's inaccurate," he said. "We can't transmit from here, only receive."

I poked the gray cable. " _This_ is the thing that's doing the receiving. I was thinking there was _something_ I could do to the cable to make it send data out instead of take it in."

"You wouldn't get very far," he replied. "We're one step removed from Bet. That cable ends in a box that isn't on Bet, one that receives signals from three other earths via coaxial cables that lack—"

"How do you know?" I asked, before he could get caught up in a jargon-laden explanation I couldn't understand.

Tinkers.

"I designed and built it," he said. "I wanted the ability to get news from Bet, and they said I could have it if I figured out how to set things up to prevent anyone from doing exactly what you're trying to do."

A dead end, then. I picked up the screwdriver again and started to put the grate back into place.

"Sorry," Prominence said.

"I had to check," I said. "It's important to have options."

I'd also feel _really_ stupid if I _hadn't_ and later found out I could have been talking with the Undersiders the entire time.

"There aren't any options with them," he said. "They will always be one step ahead of you."

"Maybe," I said. He might be right, but that wouldn't deter me from trying ways to get around Cauldron.

The fact was, I didn't trust them, couldn't _afford_ to trust that their priorities weren't skewed. They hoarded information and they made decisions for _everyone_ based off that information, and without independent review there wasn't any guarantee that the decisions they made were the best ones. I needed to be able to get everything I found back out to someone I _did_ trust—Lisa, specifically—and have her work independently on what little I was finding out in case Cauldron was on track to fuck things up.

Seeing that interview with Alexandria had troubled me at first, but I'd thought about it enough times to realize it meant: I was _very_ close to Bet, if I could only figure out the technology.  
On the surface, I was at a severe disadvantage. I didn't have a background in electronics, and I couldn't risk using my computer to search for information in case Cauldron deduced my intentions and stopped me.

As usual, the surface view was wrong.

It seemed like I wasn't going to be able to connect to Bet's internet, but it didn't matter for the simple reason I could send _Mercurial_ through the portal. Once I had enough information, I could get her to squeeze through to the intermediary earth, and from there she could go through another cable-sized portal to Bet. We got American news, so the cable was likely in the United States; it would be easy enough for her to write a letter and post it. I'd been looking at it from the wrong perspective. Why jump through hoops to send a message when I could just send a _messenger_?


	32. Turn 2

**Turn 6.2**

I took my time in climbing the stairs from Prominence's workshop to the main floor. I'd planned on that conversation going better, but _the fucking end of the world_ didn't move him the way I thought it would, and now I was at something of a loss.

I buried my frustration and thought about how to salvage my plans for the afternoon. I'd exaggerated when I'd called what I intended to do a drill; it was more of a game. I'd envisioned something like capture the flag, with the others split into two teams of four and me observing, but Prominence's refusal to join us meant there wasn't a good way to divide ourselves.

I walked past the four people on the couches in front of the television, feeling guilty and anxious even as I said nothing. It was silly, but knowing there was a social situation I was failing to control weighed far more heavily on me than Dinah's prophecy.

The easiest thing to do, the thing I _wanted_ to do, would be to postpone the "drill" and tell myself it was until I could come up with something better. But I knew I'd have to come up with something today or become paralyzed. My anxiety would combine with inertia, and things would get beyond the point of repair.

Assuming they hadn't already.

I'd been drawing a parallel between Coil and Cauldron since I'd arrived, and thinking that way kept me centered. As with Coil, I'd keep them happy until either they met my terms or I could gather enough force to leverage against them. Coil had wanted me to take over a desperate city. Cauldron wanted me to make eight people who didn't much care for each other work together.

This was _so_ much harder.

I passed Reset and Mercurial on my way to the kitchen. He was playing a game on his smartphone, and she was solving math problems, ones generated by the same program the Number Man was using to assign me homework.

That wasn't an accident; I'd mentioned Cauldron's plans about my education to Mercurial in the hope she would volunteer to study math in my place, and she had accepted. Ten minutes after she took the placement on my computer, we had each gotten an instant message from the Number Man saying that, while he was happy to accommodate anyone who wanted to learn, each pupil would need to create her own profile so the program could correctly track her progress.

It was a credit to his digital poker face that I couldn't tell if he was politely ignoring my attempt at rebellion or he genuinely hadn't realized I'd been trying to foist the homework off onto someone who _wanted_ to do it.

Which wasn't to say studying made her _happy_. She was convinced she'd learned everything she was studying now in her previous life, and it was knowledge she hadn't recovered in the year and a half since Cauldron had "saved" her. Confronting that loss on a daily basis filled her with an understandable rage I didn't know how to handle.

Her anger tended to spill over and affect the team in ways I couldn't anticipate or control—her frustration, however mildly expressed compared to Wrath's explosiveness or Teratoma's near-constant harassment, had a way of seeping into the rest of the team and causing problems. This morning her ranting about spherical trigonometry had started a discussion about navigation that had ended in the argument between Blitzeis and Wrath.

I started pulling dinner ingredients out of various cabinets: bay leaves, paprika, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and beef broth were soon lined up beside a crockpot. It was still before noon, but my original plan had been to let dinner cook on its own while we executed our "drill," and I didn't see a reason to change that plan just yet.

The female twin popped up beside me a minute or two after I started cutting up the meat. "Can I help?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. I stepped back and handed her the knife, handle-first. She took my place and began reducing the beef to cubes with rapid, precise strokes. I found another cutting board and knife and went to work on the carrots and onions.

Her brother limped up bedside us.

"Is your leg all right?" I asked, even though I already knew it wasn't and that I wouldn't be able to help him.

"Hurts," he said. "They both do. Knees. Ankles too, now."

His joints. I looked down at his hands, which he had rested on the edge of the counter, and saw the spaces in between his knuckles oozing a white fluid with the viscosity of pitch. The fluid slowed him down on its own, but as time passed, it was hardening into ceramic shards that made all movement painful and difficult. There was more now than there had been when I'd arrived.

It wasn't hard to imagine that he'd be completely immobile in a few short weeks. We would still be able to use his power if we carried him around with us, but it would be a liability and he wouldn't be in a good headspace. How long would he be able to hold up, mentally, once he became bedridden and permanently wracked with pain?

If his was the only problem I had to deal with, I might have been able to focus on it. As it was, I had seven others. I looked at Blitzeis and Wrath out of the corner of my eye. The twins' decision to join me meant that the common area couches were occupied by two angry adult men spitefully watching an episode of _Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?_

I needed to solve this problem, and I needed to solve it _now_.

My mind kept circling back to the question of how I'd integrated into the Undersiders, which was the closest thing I had to a social success.

And I couldn't even take credit for it.

Lisa had reached out to me, deliberately helped me integrate. She'd smoothed my initial entry onto the team and then reintroduced me following Leviathan. The Lisa in this situation was _supposed_ to be Prominence, but he'd abandoned that role.

I shouldn't blame him, but I did.

What else, then?

The original team had come together because Coil had wanted them to be together, but there was a reason beyond Tattletale that it had worked. We'd enjoyed each other's company, more or less. We'd just hung out. We'd played video games, gone shopping, eaten hamburgers. We'd watched television, had sleep overs, walked dogs, robbed a bank . . .

We'd been _friends_ before everything had happened.

I'd avoided thinking about it too much at the time, but I'd _liked_ that feeling of belonging, the idea I'd finally found a measure of acceptance. The anxiety of being caught as a double agent and then having to handle everything that came after Leviathan hadn't given me a lot of time to enjoy that feeling or really relax into the friendships, but the seeds had been there.

It was something else the capes here didn't have.

 _What else?_

On a deeper level? It had been an escape for all of us at first. Alec and Lisa had escaped from their families. Brian had been working to provide an out for Aisha even though he was a minor. Rachel had gotten away from having to be on the run, maybe even _loneliness_. And I had gotten away from school.

I thought about my current team. Their powers, this group, was the very opposite of an escape for them.

What about the Undersiders who'd joined after Leviathan's attack? Parian had found protection and a purpose. Flechette had found Parian, if Tagg's comments to the Wards the day he'd died were anything to go by. Aisha had found—how should I put that? A role she was valued in, plus whatever Alec had been for her.

I stole another look at the couch. I didn't see very much protection or acceptance going around, and their only common ground—amnesia and monstrosity—wasn't exactly the stuff friendships were made of.

Maybe there were parallels I could find with the Undersiders I hadn't been as close with. I didn't _like_ Imp and I had a lot of reservations about Regent that even his death hadn't erased, but I would still risk getting captured by Bonesaw for a chance to save them.

I finished dumping the carrots and onions into the crockpot and considered the origin of my loyalty. It would have to be the cape side of things: the feeling after the bank robbery, maybe. The sense of accomplishment we got from repeatedly coming out on top. _Winning_.

That wouldn't work, either. The wins my team here got were at someone else's direction, for someone else's benefit.

There were a lot of fights the Undersiders had been in that hadn't _felt_ like victories, though they technically counted. We'd avoided being butchered by Night and Fog, survived Leviathan, escaped Bonesaw by the skin of our teeth, and eventually defeated Echidna. We'd gone through half a dozen iterations of hell together, and we'd come out alive and kicking on the other side every time.

That fit.

If I'd learned _anything_ since April, it was that there was no shortage of enemies out there. I'd find one, one more beatable than Cauldron seemingly was, and force my team to defend themselves as a cohesive whole or fail.

I turned the crockpot on and checked the time. The flies on the hands of the analogue clock I'd purchased told me it was 11:58.

I turned the television off with a flying spider.

"Team meeting," I announced. "Two minutes."

Mercurial looked up from her tablet. "Teratoma—"

"Is on her way down," I said. That was a little bit of an exaggeration; I'd just set a swarm clone into her room to get her. I chose to ignore the fact she was taking a little bit longer to put her book up and come downstairs than was strictly necessary; her delay meant that Mercurial had enough time to solve the problem she was working on.

Once they were assembled, I took stock of their expressions and positions. I'd decided not to move from the kitchen. I was leaning against the kitchen counter, having waited for them to come to me. The people whose support I was more confident of—the twins, Mercurial, and Reset—hadn't had to move, but Blitzeis and Wrath had physically removed themselves from the site of their argument to get into the kitchen.

Their faces displayed varying degrees of suspicion (Blitzeis, Reset), irritation (Wrath, Teratoma), and interest (Mercurial, the twins), and that gave me a good starting point.

"So," Teratoma said. She'd chosen to stand immediately behind Mercurial, who didn't seem to notice the intrusion into her personal space. "What do you want?"

"Training," I said. "We're going to spend a few hours playing capture the flag. The idea is to exercise so I can see how all of you work together, get a sense of what your powers can do for myself, and figure out where the problems are."

"Problems?" Wrath asked. He seemed offended by the idea.

I shouldn't have used that word.

"There are always problems," I said calmly. "It's best to find out what they are _before_ a real fight. In an exercise against an enemy who _won't_ kill you."

"You want to give us a fight with training wheels," Teratoma said.

"Exactly."

"We don't need to play a game to train," Teratoma said. "We've been doing this for a while."

"All our lives," Wrath added. "So to speak."

"Then where are the others?" I asked.

"Others?" Blitzeis repeated. "You mean Prominence?"

"Where _is_ Prominence?" Teratoma asked.

"The others," I said, ignoring Teratoma. "I noticed four people have died this year alone. The only other group I know of that has that kind of death rate is the Slaughterhouse Nine."

Blitzeis looked uncomfortable; Teratoma smirked. "Are you calling us psychos?" she asked.

"You aren't," I said. _Well, most of you aren't_. "That's why . . ." _It's a problem_. "I'm confused."

"Maybe we could enlighten you," Wrath said.

I could sense the hostility below the sarcasm, knew that things would blow up in my face if I played this wrong. "You're always on the offense," I said. "The people you're going after never know you're coming. The other capes you might fight don't have the same level of powers that you do. You're _better_ than your enemies, _and_ you have the advantage of surprise."

The ability to pick and choose battles, the—that was the kind of thing I'd have _killed_ for in Brockton Bay.

"I think it might actually play into what's going wrong," I continued. "The cape who had most recently died had lasted all of _two days_ ," I said. His death had _also_ taken out the leader I'd replaced.

"Bad luck?" Teratoma offered.

"That does exist." I stopped myself from saying anything about making your own luck, or pointing out that they were playing cape on _easy_ mode. They couldn't feel lucky, and I didn't want to stir up those feelings. "So does overconfidence. My best guess is you've been doing this long enough you underestimate the people you're going up against. When things go wrong, you can fall back on brute and mover powers to save you."

"Whatever works," Teratoma said. "Wrath and I have the firepower angle covered. Blitz and Em can get whatever else we need without getting themselves killed."

"It's not really about you two," I said. "I'm expecting you to go along with it for everyone else's sake."

I paused, waiting for the objections, but they let me continue.

"The last ones who died were two thinkers, a blaster, and a master. The twins are thinkers. Reset is something like a blaster. I'm a master. The costumes I'm making now will help some, but we still have to learn how to fight together, as a _team_."

"Why bother?" Wrath asked. "Perhaps what you're saying is true, but things have changed, with Reset here. If we get hurt, he can just restore to where we were before."

"He can't save anyone if he's dead," I said. "And I've already thought of three ways to kill him that he couldn't defend against, eight if you count the ones I couldn't do myself."

"Bloodthirsty," Teratoma observed.

"You haven't spent time thinking about how to beat me in a fight?" I asked.

She didn't deny it.

I looked at the others. "Thinking about our weaknesses and working to eliminate or compensate for them is common sense. Questions?"

"Yeah, I have two," Teratoma said. "Why isn't Prominence going to be with us?"

"Someone has to stay behind to look after Tripwire," I said.

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn't press the point.

I was relieved. "What's your other question?"

"Where do you think we're going to get a training enemy?" Teratoma asked.

I stopped myself from smiling.

"Haven't you guessed yet?" I asked. "Me."


	33. Turn 3

**Turn 6.3**

I'd win.

That was a foregone conclusion.

I'd win, and it would be easy.

The hard part would be keeping myself from going overboard, from giving in to the urge to use my power without holding back, from winning so quickly and thoroughly I completely demoralized them.

So I'd win.

But not by much.

As I moved downstream from the mountain my base was built into, I considered how to make it fair for them and decided _time_ would make for a good handicap. Waiting to make a move until they'd already made theirs would be enough of a challenge that I'd get to exercise my power, which I hadn't seriously used in a month—outside of the brief excursion into Bet with the Number Man.

I hung my flag up on a sapling, retired a hundred or so feet, and found a downed tree to wait on.

A few minutes later, my bugs brought me a small tupperware container. It was sealed inside a plastic bag and contained two packs of index cards and a handful of pens.

This was another element in my plan to talk with Lisa. I'd hidden it on one of my morning hikes. My bugs had found a long-abandoned den nobody without a sensory power could find and I'd sent them in with the container. Even if someone knew to look for it, it was stashed far enough back they wouldn't be able to reach it.

I popped it open and reread the notes I'd made on the first four index cards. These were the messages I intended to send to Lisa. Each card contained bits of knowledge I thought might help in her quest to piece everything together.

I imagined the replies I might get. "C Yellow. Ruling Brockton Bay in your stead. Brian unstable, Rachel alone, Alec dead, Aisha grieving, Accord insufferable. Confirming Hero was Cauldron, though? _So_ worth it."

Maybe one-way communication would be better. It would definitely be _safer_ , if all Mercurial had to do was leave a message rather than wait for a response. I'd just have to trust Lisa to understand and make the right choices with the information.

So far I had notes on the overlap between the Protectorate and Cauldron, Cauldron's interventions against power-related threats, my speculations on Contessa and the Doctor's powers, and the cryptic hints I'd gotten about the end of the world.

Today I was going to write down my observations about the brainwashing and memory erasure. _A Banana_ , I wrote. I paused, trying to choose phrasing that would be indecipherable to most people and yet convey enough for Tattletale to understand.

"Weaver?"

It came from Tripwire's twin, Rabbit Punch—a name she chose, so far as I could tell, solely on the basis she thought rabbits were cute.

She was standing at the edge of the clearing, holding a blue fabric triangle in her porcelain hands.

The flag they were supposed to be defending from me.

"Blitzeis told me to give this to you," she said.

I pursed my lips. "That's not how the game works."

"Wrath says it's pointless and they don't want to play," she said.

I thought I'd won this argument already. I returned my index card and pen to the tupperware and handed it off to my bugs.

"Can you go home?" I asked, considering how I was going to move forward. Keeping the twins away from the conversation I was about to have would be safer for everyone involved, and using them to occupy my biggest problem would kill two birds with one stone. "Get your brother and hang out with Prominence."

She looked at her feet. "Prominence doesn't like us."

"Tell him I think it's a good idea. If he doesn't want to talk to you, just follow him around."

She nodded and ran off.

I moved in the direction she'd come from—uphill—and debated what tone to strike. Cajoling, but willing to forgive? _Hey guys, you're not supposed to give the flag to me?_

Or should I get angry? I _was_ angry, I could admit that, but I doubted that starting off by expressing that anger was a sound choice. After all, I wasn't necessarily angry at _them_.

Maybe I should just listen to them. Hear them out.

It took me about ten minutes for my bugs to find them, and another five for me to pick my way up the side of the mountain to the rocky outcrop they had occupied.

They were completely silent as I approached, and remained silent after I'd stepped out from behind the trees into their field of view.

Reset, who was probably only there because everyone else was, sat in the middle. He wouldn't be a factor in this upcoming conversation. Wrath and Blitzeis were on one side, sitting shoulder to shoulder. They'd been fighting earlier.

Mercurial had taken off her jacket, which exposed her forearms. One of them bore a livid mark—red and blistered skin raised into the Cauldron _c_. I hadn't seen it on her before.

Teratoma sat on the far right, less than an inch away from Mercurial, protective by proximity. She'd started to grow tumors, possibly to intimidate or use on me, and they bulged through the bright yellow tanktop and shorts she was wearing. I snuck mosquitos onto them so I'd have a sense of when they'd pop.

I couldn't help but notice they'd arranged things so they were looking down at me.

My eyes went back to Mercurial's arm. "That looks like a fresh burn," I remarked.

"It doesn't hurt," she said.

"That's good," I said.

" _Nothing_ hurts."

"That's . . ." _Bad_ was probably not appropriate. I shouldn't have started talking without getting a better sense of what I wanted.

She cut me off, which was probably best for the both of us. "I have a mental sense of what my body _should_ be. The length of my fingers. What color my eyes are. How badly I freckle. This _thing_."

I stayed quiet. How did that work with a power like hers? Had they branded her immediately after she triggered, or gotten an unpowered subordinate to do it while she was triggering? Was maintaining it part of the brainwashing?

The blisters went down and the outline of the mark faded. "I make an effort to hide it," she said. "It's not something I want on my body. I have enough problems there without their mark. Maintaining this shape is hard, but it's uncomfortable for me not to. A permanent mental itch, regardless of what I do. I can push myself one way or another, but not for long."

I needed to think of something to say.

"It applies to everything, not just how I look. My organs don't do anything, but they want to be arranged a certain way. Sometimes I pretend to sleep, though I don't need it. I eat, though I never get hungry. Not doing that feels wrong, but doing it also feels wrong. It's just . . ."

"A stress position," Teratoma supplied. "She can't ever get comfortable, only change from one kind of pain to another. It's a hands-free method of torture. That's how she lives."

"I think you've been thinking of me as normal," Mercurial replied. "I'm not."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I should have known, or at least guessed from what you'd said. Prevented you from feeling like you had to tell me all of that." I frowned, trying to figure out if there was any truth in the accusation. I couldn't find any.

"I'm also sorry for having come off as thinking of you as more 'normal' versus less, and that it seems tied to your appearances. But it's not how I think. I need to tell you something—the scariest, most monstrous people I know look 'normal,'" I said, throwing scare quotes around the last word. Jack Slash, Bonesaw, Panacea, Alec. Alexandria, always.

"You say that, but there's a scale for how you treat us," Teratoma said. "She's on the good side, I'm on the not good side."

I caught Wrath nodding.

"I don't know if you want my honest response to that," I said slowly. "I'd rather take my time to collect my thoughts than blurt out something stupid or wrong."

"There's not much you could say that'd be right."

Were they _trying_ to leave me with no ground to retreat to? _Trying_ to make me lash out? "Wrath. Teratoma. The truth is that I like you less, but it's because of how you act and treat other people, not because of what your powers do. You remind me of the people who made me trigger."

"You don't remind me of anyone," Teratoma said. "I don't have anyone to reference, _Taylor_. All I have are the ones who came here, the ones who died. I don't even get to go out and go shopping or do a whole lot on any of the earths we're allowed to go to. I'm probably twice your age, but—I might as well be a child. So _I'm sorry_ if I'm not the fucking fountain of kindness and light you apparently need me to be."

I wished she'd given me something more specific to go on, more concrete to argue against than this. "Don't be. It's fair," I said. "I have a lot of biases and I don't see myself letting go of those biases any time soon. And if I can accept that, then I can understand that you might use being sarcastic and needling people as your way of coping . . . I won't criticize that, but I will ask you to keep it in check for the sake of everyone here. Wrath, too."

She grimaced. "We're in a real _bitch_ of a situation, you know?"

"I know," I said.

"That was rhetorical," Wrath said.

Without missing a beat, Teratoma continued the thought. "Because you _don't_ know."

I looked from one face to the next. They were ganging up on me, one after the other. Coordinated, presenting a united front against me. That had been the goal, but I'd wanted to achieve it in a different way. "Okay," I said. "I don't. I can't. What does this have to do with not wanting to train?"

"We've been observing Prominence," Wrath said. "You said something that isolated him, made him break off from the rest of us."

I couldn't deny it, but I didn't want to tell them the root of his problem with them was his own guilt.

It was Mercurial's turn to speak. "There are words you could say, gestures that you could make, that would let you bring us under control. Make us stumble, or hesitate long enough to give you an opening, or compel us to obey you. Prominence knows them."

"And he isn't here," Teratoma said. "If we don't want to play your game, we don't have to. And we don't."

I paused at that; I knew that his role was to provide a form of stability, but I hadn't realized that he would lean on the programming Cauldron's brainwashing had left behind. "It's not a game, not really. But there are rules, and one of them is this. You defeat the big threat _first_ and _then_ you take care of the smaller issues. If you don't do this, everyone loses."

Teratoma was dangerously close to bursting. "Do you think we have a lot to lose?"

"No. At least, I don't think you think so. And yes, this is—fucked up." I was just beginning to realize I'd barely scratched the surface of what they had to live with. A single month of living with them hadn't equipped me to deal with this at all. "But so's the rest of the world. We'll _make do_."

I even thought they might have a leg up. They'd already lost everything. Already seen the darker side of things.

But I wasn't going to say that to their faces. Not yet, anyway.

I was still going to go for a logical argument. I looked to Mercurial for this; she was interested in the cape scene. Or she had been, until I'd spilled the beans about Cauldron running the Protectorate.

"You know how I said Armsmaster resigned his position? The truth is he was arrested by the Protectorate because he used the Leviathan fight as a pretext to kill local villains. He got caught and they locked him up. It didn't matter how big he was or how hard he worked or how much good he'd done or how bad they were. Killing them while they fought Leviathan, breaching the Truce? It ended his career."

"He's free again," Mercurial said. "As Defiant."

"Yes," I said. "They released him into Dragon's custody because they thought he'd be able to do some good against the Slaughterhouse Nine. Again, they emphasized fighting the bigger threat over the smaller differences."

"It's _so_ interesting to hear about your experiences," Wrath said. "Perhaps we learned a similar lesson at one point."

Teratoma shrugged. "But if we did, we forgot."

"That's not where I was going with that," I said. "I'm saying that you need to work with me on this, end whatever is threatening us. And then I'll help you guys and everyone like you bring Cauldron to justice. Destroy them."

They all recoiled, looking like I'd slapped the lot of them. Part of me wished I had.

" _No_ ," Blitzeis said.

There'd been something in the pages of the Cauldron contract Lisa had discovered: _subjects are entirely loyal to Cauldron_. This is what that looked like in practice.

"Fine," I said. I wondered what they'd do if I destroyed Cauldron and only told them afterwards. Was there an insurance policy in place? Would they be compelled to come after me for revenge?

I abandoned that line of thought—for now. "Okay. Then we'll just ignore them."

Teratoma laughed. "Oh, Weaver. Skitter. _Taylor_. You're one of them, _Taylor_."

My name again. I hadn't shared it, based off of Prominence's advice, but the television they'd watched had obviously been more than willing to share. Damn Dragon and Defiant for outing me, and damn the smear campaign that had accompanied my trial.

"They wanted an overseer." Blitzeis's voice was quiet. "You agreed."

I had no response to that. What choice had I had? I'd already explained that the need to unify against a bigger threat trumped other considerations, and they'd rejected it.

"Then what do you want from me?" I asked.

"A choice," Mercurial said, looking at the ground.

I thought about giving in to them, thought about it for longer than I would have done for anyone else. I was tempted. It seemed almost _wrong_ to force them into this. "I'm sorry," I said, and my swarm surged forward. "The Truce isn't something I can compromise on."

This wasn't how I'd wanted to make my point, but I'd make it work.


End file.
